2 ms·

Using the term AGI and not including any performance analysis. My AI calls it: "massive marketing overreach". Somebody called this slop in the comments. As a p

Using the term AGI and not including any performance analysis. My AI calls it: "massive marketing overreach". Somebody called this slop in the comments. As a professor who published on continual learning I'm leaning towards agreement[1]. It lacks any substance. No relation to related work, no description of algorithm, no ablation study, just hand-waving that we're feeding some data and "Chess is not forgotten". This "how-continual-learning-works" markdown text is not an algorithm [2]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12530 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12530 [2] https://github.com/volotat/mini-AGI/#how-continual-learning-works https://github.com/volotat/mini-AGI/#how-continual-learning-...

ilaksh 5d ago
Actually I'm mad that I wasted my time looking at it based on the claims. He implies it is trained and uses the term "AGI" and "continuous learning". He never finished a single training run or enough that he considers not "undertrained". It's not trained. And actually there is no evidence that it can actually learn anything useful.
- synctext 5d ago
  Indeed this is wasting HN time. "The model reads 524,000 characters of chess". This is 100KByte of training data in a toy model with rigid parameters and no global learning. Gap with real LLM and trillions of tokens. This model really addresses the problem of preserving previously learned knowledge, but by restricting the LR of the trunk it stops acquiring new knowledge. Details: "Rethinking the Stability-Plasticity Trade-off in Continual Learning from an Architectural Perspective"
volotat 5d ago
There is no special algorithm, the finding is that slowing down the LR or the trunk, while keeping the LR of the experts is enough to eliminate most of the forgetting in the network. You can see in that experiment where chess data was the only thing the model read for 524K characters, yet it kept almost the same performance (i.e. held-out loss) on all other domains. If you keep LR the same across the whole network the loss in other domains degrades dramatically - this is a clear sign of catastrophic forgetting in action. What I can say for sure is that any traditional network that does pose a sign of catastrophic forgetting would not be able to learn any patterns from a single stream of data. There are no benchmarks published as the model is heavily undertrained, but it is learning. And you can see this clearly in the loss and samples even though they are still barely coherent. I am not an academic and am not trying to publish a paper about a “major breakthrough” or something like this. I am just a small person who found a cool thing that clearly works and wants to share it with the world. That’s it.
- ilaksh 5d ago
  You can't claim it "works" if it hasn't produced any coherent responses and is still early in your first training attempt.
  - volotat 5d ago
    It is a goalpost that is easy to move. By "works" I mean learning from a continuous single (meaning batch-1) stream of data. The fact that it produces full words and full coherent phrases instead of a random stream of characters that would any typical LM produce if trained under the same training regime.
    - ilaksh 5d ago
      I would be okay if you shared it as a potential idea and possibly interesting early result, but the language you are actually using to characterize it is misleading or delusional. Please get a model to the point where it seems like it has some natural language understanding and then share again with reasonable characterization.
      - volotat 5d ago
        For sure. As it will pass through the whole corpus I will share the weights, run it through established benchmarks for small models and share all of this as an update. I am also planning on making a Youtube video explaining in detail how it works on a deeper level and the whole reasoning behind why it is built the way it is. But no promises here.
      - deleted 5d ago
        [deleted]
      - bigbadfeline 5d ago
        Is "AGI" the language that bothers you? Well, one has to keep his eyes on the prize and I see a bright idea which could lead to AGI, so, why not describe it as such? I also see the inspiration and hard work necessary to move that idea further along, so fingers crossed.

ilaksh 5d ago

Actually I'm mad that I wasted my time looking at it based on the claims. He implies it is trained and uses the term "AGI" and "continuous learning". He never finished a single training run or enough that he considers not "undertrained". It's not trained. And actually there is no evidence that it can actually learn anything useful.

synctext 5d ago
Indeed this is wasting HN time. "The model reads 524,000 characters of chess". This is 100KByte of training data in a toy model with rigid parameters and no global learning. Gap with real LLM and trillions of tokens. This model really addresses the problem of preserving previously learned knowledge, but by restricting the LR of the trunk it stops acquiring new knowledge. Details: "Rethinking the Stability-Plasticity Trade-off in Continual Learning from an Architectural Perspective"

volotat 5d ago

There is no special algorithm, the finding is that slowing down the LR or the trunk, while keeping the LR of the experts is enough to eliminate most of the forgetting in the network. You can see in that experiment where chess data was the only thing the model read for 524K characters, yet it kept almost the same performance (i.e. held-out loss) on all other domains. If you keep LR the same across the whole network the loss in other domains degrades dramatically - this is a clear sign of catastrophic forgetting in action. What I can say for sure is that any traditional network that does pose a sign of catastrophic forgetting would not be able to learn any patterns from a single stream of data. There are no benchmarks published as the model is heavily undertrained, but it is learning. And you can see this clearly in the loss and samples even though they are still barely coherent. I am not an academic and am not trying to publish a paper about a “major breakthrough” or something like this. I am just a small person who found a cool thing that clearly works and wants to share it with the world. That’s it.

ilaksh 5d ago
You can't claim it "works" if it hasn't produced any coherent responses and is still early in your first training attempt.
- volotat 5d ago
  It is a goalpost that is easy to move. By "works" I mean learning from a continuous single (meaning batch-1) stream of data. The fact that it produces full words and full coherent phrases instead of a random stream of characters that would any typical LM produce if trained under the same training regime.
  - ilaksh 5d ago
    I would be okay if you shared it as a potential idea and possibly interesting early result, but the language you are actually using to characterize it is misleading or delusional. Please get a model to the point where it seems like it has some natural language understanding and then share again with reasonable characterization.
    - volotat 5d ago
      For sure. As it will pass through the whole corpus I will share the weights, run it through established benchmarks for small models and share all of this as an update. I am also planning on making a Youtube video explaining in detail how it works on a deeper level and the whole reasoning behind why it is built the way it is. But no promises here.
    - deleted 5d ago
      [deleted]
    - bigbadfeline 5d ago
      Is "AGI" the language that bothers you? Well, one has to keep his eyes on the prize and I see a bright idea which could lead to AGI, so, why not describe it as such? I also see the inspiration and hard work necessary to move that idea further along, so fingers crossed.