Jeremy Howard: evaluation

Transcript context

…oh my God. And then the researchers look at the developers and they're like, oh, they're killing it, making all this stuff with all these people using it and talking on Twitter about how great it is. I think they're both a bit intimidated by each other, you know. And so I have to kind of remind them like, okay, there are lots of things in this world where you suck compared to lots of other people in this company, but also vice versa, you know, for all things. And the reason you came here is because you wanted to learn about those other things from those other people and have an opportunity to like bring them all together into a single unit. You know, it's not reasonable to expect you're going to be better at everything than everybody else. I guess the other part of it is for nearly all of the people in the company, to be honest, they have nearly always been better than everybody else at nearly everything they're doing nearly everywhere they've been. So it's kind of weird to be in this situation now where it's like, gee, I can clearly see that I suck at this thing that I'm meant to be able to do compared to these other people where I'm like the worst in the company at this thing for some things. So I think that's a healthy place to be, you know, as long as you keep reminding each other about that's actually why we're here. And like, it's all a bit of an experiment, like we don't have any managers. We don't have any hierarchy from that point of view. So for example, I'm not a manager, which means I don't get to tell people what to do or how to do it or when to do it. Yeah, it's been a bit of an experiment to see how that would work out. And it's been great. So for instance, Ben Clavier, who you might have come across, he's the author of Ragatouille, he's the author of Rerankers, super strong information retrieval guy. And a few weeks ago, you know, this additional channel appeared on Discord, on our private Discord called Bert24. And these people started appearing, as in our collab sections, we have a collab section for like collaborating with outsiders. And these people started appearing, there are all these names that I recognize, like Bert24, and they're all talking about like the next generation of Bert. And I start following along, it's like, okay, Ben decided that I think, quite rightly, we need a new Bert. Because everybody, like so many people are still using Bert, and it's still the best at so many things, but it actually doesn't take advantage of lots of best practices. And so he just went out and found basically everybody who's created better Berts in the last four or five years, brought them all together, suddenly there's this huge collaboration going on. So yeah, I didn't tell him to do that. He didn't ask my permission to do that. And then, like, Benjamin Warner dived in, and he's like, oh, I created a whole transformers from scratch implementation designed to be maximally hackable. He originally did it largely as a teaching exercise to show other people, but he was like, I could, you know, use that to create a really hackable BERT implementation. In fact, he didn't say that. le. He originally did it largely as a teaching exercise to show other people, but he was like, I could, you know, use that to create a really hackable BERT implementation. In fact, he didn't say that. He said, I just did do that, you know, and I created a repo, and then everybody's like starts using it. They're like, oh my god, this is amazing. I can now implement all these other BERT things. And it's not just answer AI guys there, you know, there's lots of folks, you know, who have like contributed new data set mixes and blah, blah, blah. So, I mean, I can help in the same way that other people can help. So like, then Ben Clavier reached out to me at one point and said, can you help me, like, what have you learned over time about how to manage intimidatingly capable and large groups of people who you're nominally meant to be leading? And so, you know, I like to try to help, but I don't direct. Another great example was Kerem, who, after our FSTP QLORA work, decided quite correctly that it didn't really make sense to use LoRa in today's world. You want to use the normalized version, which is called Dora. Like two or three weeks after we did FSTP QLORA, he just popped up and said, okay, I've just converted the whole thing to Dora, and I've also created these VLLM extensions, and I've got all these benchmarks, and, you know, now I've got training of quantized models with adapters that are as fast as LoRa, and as actually better than, weirdly, fine tuning. Just like, okay, that's great, you know. And yeah, so the things we've done to try to help make these things happen as well is we don't have any required meetings, you know, but we do have a meeting for each pair of major time zones that everybody's invited to, and, you know, people see their colleagues doing stuff that looks really cool and say, like, oh, how can I help, you know, or how can I learn or whatever. So another example is Austin, who, you know, amazing background. He ran AI at Fidelity, he ran AI at Pfizer, he ran browsing and retrieval for Google's DeepMind stuff, created Jemma.cpp, and he's been working on a new system to make it easier to do web GPU programming, because, again, he quite correctly identified, yeah, so I said to him, like, okay, I want to learn about that. Not an area that I have much expertise in, so, you know, he's going to show me what he's working on and teach me a bit about it, and hopefully I can help contribute. I think one of the key things that's happened in all of these is everybody understands what Eric Gilliam, who wrote the second blog post in our series, the R&D historian, describes as a large yard with narrow fences. Everybody has total flexibility to do what they want. body understands what Eric Gilliam, who wrote the second blog post in our series, the R&D historian, describes as a large yard with narrow fences. Everybody has total flexibility to do what they want. We all understand kind of roughly why we're here, you know, we agree with the premises around, like, everything's too expensive, everything's too complicated, people are building too many vanity foundation models rather than taking better advantage of fine-tuning, like, there's this kind of general, like, sense of we're all on the same wavelength about, you know, all the ways in which current research is fucked up, and, you know, all the ways in which we're worried about centralization. We all care a lot about not just research for the point of citations, but research that actually wouldn't have happened otherwise, and actually is going to lead to real-world outcomes. And so, yeah, with this kind of, like, shared vision, people understand, like, you know, so when I say, like, oh, well, you know, tell me, Ben, about BERT 24, what's that about? And he's like, you know, like, oh, well, you know, you can see from an accessibility point of view, or you can see from a kind of a actual practical impact point of view, there's far too much focus on decoder-only models, and, you know, like, BERT's used in all of these different places and industry, and so I can see, like, in terms of our basic principles, what we're trying to achieve, this seems like something important. And so I think that's, like, a really helpful that we have that kind of shared perspective, you know?…

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