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Quentin Anthony: recommendation

16 Aug 2023 Latent Space The Mathematics of Training LLMs — with Quentin Anthony of Eleuther AI

“I would say I do look at ways to improve upon it using things like second order optimizers.”

— Quentin Anthony

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Speaker
Quentin Anthony
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
16 Aug 2023
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…And Quentin, when you say in the blog post, it says, Adam is magic. How much of it is like actual magic, even to like people like you that are pretty close to the metal, so to speak? Are some of these things just come as gospel? It's like, I know this works, like I'm not touching it. I'm just leveraging it. How much of it are you actually thinking about improving on in your day-to-day work? I see. So I'm a systems guy. I'm an engineer. And a lot of these things come to me as magic. Adam comes to me as magic. I see it from the gods. I say, this is how a deep learning model is trained. And this is how the next step is calculated. And then I say, okay, how do I make that fast? I would say I do look at ways to improve upon it using things like second order optimizers. So there's a lot of research on there because they're hard to distribute. But the core contribution for me always comes down to someone else has done like some deep learning optimization and I need to make it run fast. So I can't really speak to the motivation of why Adam came about other than like simple, intuitive things like I mentioned with like the momentum. But what matters to me is that Adam takes more memory than SGD, specifically three times. And all of that memory needs to go somewhere and it needs to be split efficiently. Yeah.…

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