Jeremy Howard: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, absolutely. And I'll say like, you know, it's interesting that it mentioned Elmo because in some ways that was kind of diametrically opposed to, to ULM fit. You know, there was these kind of like, so there was a lot of, there was a lot of activity at the same time as ULM fits released. So there was, um, so before it, as Brian McCann, I think at Salesforce had come out with this neat model that did a kind of multitask learning, but again, they didn't create a general fine tune language model first. There was Elmo, um, which I think was a lip, you know, actually quite a few months after the first ULM fit example, I think. Um, but yeah, there was a bit of this stuff going on. And the problem was everybody was doing, and particularly after GPT came out, then everybody wanted to focus on zero shot and few shot learning. You know, everybody hated fine tuning. Everybody hated transfer learning. And like, I literally did tours trying to get people to start doing transfer learning and people, you know, nobody was interested, particularly after GPT showed such good results with zero shot and few shot learning. And so I actually feel like we kind of went backwards for years and, and not to be honest, I mean, I'm a bit sad about this now, but I kind of got so disappointed and dissuaded by like, it felt like these bigger lab, much bigger labs, you know, like fast AI had only ever been just me and Rachel were getting all of this attention for an approach I thought was the wrong way to do it. You know, I was convinced was the wrong way to do it. And so, yeah, for years people were really focused on getting better at zero shot and few shots and it wasn't until, you know, this key idea of like, well, let's take the ULM fit approach, but for step two, rather than fine tuning on a kind of a domain corpus, let's fine tune on an instruction corpus. And then in step three, rather than fine tuning on a reasonably specific task classification, let's fine tune on a, on a RLHF task classification. And so that was really, that was really key, you know, so I was kind of like out of the NLP field for a few years there because yeah, it just felt like, I don't know, pushing uphill against this vast tide, which I was convinced was not the right direction, but who's going to listen to me, you know, cause I, as you said, I don't have a PhD, not at a university, or at least I wasn't then. I don't have a big set of computers to fine tune huge transformer models. So yeah, it was definitely difficult. It's always been hard. You know, it's always been hard. Like I've always been somebody who does not want to build stuff on lots of big computers because most people don't have lots of big computers and I hate creating stuff that most people can't use, you know, and also stuff that's created on lots of big computers has always been like much more media friendly. e don't have lots of big computers and I hate creating stuff that most people can't use, you know, and also stuff that's created on lots of big computers has always been like much more media friendly. So like, it might seem like a recent thing, but actually throughout my 30 years in data science, the attention's always been on, you know, the big iron results. So when I first started, everybody was talking about data warehouses and it was all about Teradata and it'd be like, oh, this big bank has this huge room full of computers and they have like terabytes of data available, you know, at the press of a button. And yeah, that's always what people want to talk about, what people want to write about. And then of course, students coming out of their PhDs and stuff, that's where they want to go work because that's where they read about. And to me, it's a huge distraction, you know, because like I say, most people don't have unlimited compute and I want to help most people, not the small subset of the most well-off people.…

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