Shawn Wang: uncertainty

Transcript context

…how you choose to write it, I guess. You know, or another example, a guy named Vic, who was previously the CEO of DataQuest, and like, in that case, you know, he's created a really successful startup. He won the first, basically, Kaggle NLP competition, which was automatic essay grading. He's got the current state-of-the-art OCR system, Surya. Again, he's just a guy who obviously just builds stuff, you know, he doesn't ask for permission, he doesn't need any, like, external resources. Actually, Karim's another great example of this, I mean, I already knew Karim very well because he was my best ever master's student, but it wasn't a surprise to me then when he then went off to create the world's state-of-the-art language model in Turkish on his own, in his spare time, with no budget, from scratch. This is not fine-tuning or whatever, he, like, went back to Common Crawl and did everything. Yeah, it's kind of, I don't know what I'd describe that process as, but it's not at all based on credentials. Assemble based on talent, yeah. We wanted to dive in a little bit more on, you know, turning from the people side of things into the technical bets that you're making. Just a little bit more on Bert. I was actually, we just did an interview with Yi Tay from Reka, I don't know if you're familiar with his work, but also another encoder-decoder bet, and one of his arguments was actually people kind of over-index on the decoder-only GPT-3 type paradigm. I wonder if you have thoughts there that is maybe non-consensus as well. Yeah, no, absolutely. So I think it's a great example. So one of the people we're collaborating with a little bit with BERT24 is Colin Raffle, who is the guy behind, yeah, most of that stuff, you know, between that and UL2, there's a lot of really interesting work. And so one of the things I've been encouraging the BERT group to do, Colin has as well, is to consider using a T5 pre-trained encoder backbone as a thing you fine-tune, which I think would be really cool. You know, Colin was also saying actually just use encoder-decoder as your Bert, you know, why don't you like use that as a baseline, which I also think is a good idea. Yeah, look.…

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