Mentions personal use of ULM Fit.

Transcript context

…Jeremy, had people not tried because it was like too complicated to actually get the data and like set up the training? Or like, were people just lazy and kind of like, hey, this is just not going to work? No, everybody wasn't lazy. So like, so the person I thought at that time who, you know, there were two people I thought at that time, actually, who were the strongest at language models were Stephen Merity and Alec Radford. And at the time I didn't know Alec, but I, after we had both, after I'd released ULM Fit and he had released GPT, I organized a chat for both of us with Kate Metz in the New York Times. And Kate Metz answered, sorry, and Alec answered this question for Kate. And Kate was like, so how did, you know, GPT come about? And he said, well, I was pretty sure that pre-training on a general large corpus wouldn't work. So I hadn't tried it. And then I read ULM Fit and turns out it did work. And so I did it, you know, bigger and it worked even better. And similar with, with Stephen, you know, I asked Stephen Merity, like, why don't we just find, you know, take your AWD-ASTLM and like train it on all of Wikipedia and fine tune it? And he's kind of like, well, I don't think that's going to really lie. Like two years before I did a very popular talk at KDD, the conference where everybody in NLP was in the audience. I recognized half the faces, you know, and I told them all this, I'm sure transfer learning is the key. I'm sure ImageNet, you know, is going to be an NLP thing as well. And, you know, everybody was interested and people asked me questions afterwards and, but not just, yeah, nobody followed up because everybody knew that it didn't work. I mean, even like, so we were scooped a little bit by Dai and Lee, Kwok Lee at Google. They had, they had, I already, I didn't even realize this, which is a bit embarrassing. They had already done a large language model and fine tuned it. But again, they didn't create a general purpose, large language model on a general purpose corpus. They only ever tested a domain specific corpus. And I haven't spoken to Kwok actually about that, but I assume that the reason was the same. It probably just didn't occur to them that the general approach could work. So maybe it was that kind of 30 years of mulling over the, the cell Chinese room experiment that had convinced me that it probably would work. I don't know. Yeah. Interesting. I just dug up Alec announcement tweet from 2018. He said, inspired by Cobe, Elmo, and Yola, I'm fit. We should have a single transformer language model can be fine tuned to a wide variety. It's interesting because, you know, today people think of AI as the leader, kind of kind of like the research lab pushing forward the field. What was that at the time? You know, like kind of like going back five years, people think of it as an overnight success, but obviously it took a while.…

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