So one thing that had really bothered me was that recent Arxiv paper claiming that despite GPT 3 being 175B, and GPT 4 being around 1.7T, somehow 3.5 Turbo was 20b.
This had been on my mind for the past couple of days because it just made no sense to me, so this evening I went to go check out the paper again, and noticed that I could not download the PDF or postscript. Then I saw this update comment on the Arxiv page, added yesterday:
Contains inappropriately sourced conjecture of OpenAI’s ChatGPT parameter count from this http URL, a citation which was omitted. The authors do not have direct knowledge or verification of this information, and relied solely on this article, which may lead to public confusion
That link leads to a Forbes article, from before GPT 4 even released, that claims that ChatGPT in general is 20b parameters.
It seems like the chatbot application was one of the most popular ones, so ChatGPT came out first. ChatGPT is not just smaller (20 billion vs. 175 billion parameters) and therefore faster than GPT-3, but it is also more accurate than GPT-3 when solving conversational tasks—a perfect business case for a lower cost/better quality AI product.
So it would appear that they sourced that knowledge from Forbes, and after everyone got really confused they realized that it might not actually be correct, and the paper got modified.
So, before some wild urban legend forms that GPT 3.5 is 20b, just thought I’d mention that lol.
My guess, pulled from deep within my ass, is that it is a cluster of models, many possibly in the 20b range. The results we get aren’t from a single 20b model, but from one of many models that have been “optimized” (whatever that means) for particular areas. Some router function tries to match input prompts to the best model for that prompt and then sends it to that model.
Totally making things up, here, but I can see benefits to doing it this way.
GPT 3.5 probably has more than 20b parameters, but then why is its API several times cheaper than text-davinci-003?
Although at the same time GPT 3.5 is good at facts and is great at creating text in many languages, while the opensource models are not always good even with English, because with 20b parameters it’s hard to store much data, so there’s probably a lot more than 20b
I agree. It’s possible it’s that small but I just think that’s unlikely.
Probably heavily quantized and uses a smaller gpt-3 model.
I think this is ass-covering. Microsoft Research don’t know the scale of ChatGPT? What are the odds?
They have to deny the leak by providing a non-credible attribution instead of saying “lmao we just talked to OpenAI engineers over a dinner”, sure. But this doesn’t mean that they, or Forbes, or multiple people who tested Turbo speed, compared costs and concluded it’s in the 20B range, or others are wrong. I’d rather believe that Forbes got an insider leak about a model as it was getting readied.
We know that Turbo is quantized, at least.
And it really started even with GPT-3. We built this model. And I actually did the initial productionization of it. And so you have this research model that takes all these GPUs. We compressed it down to basically end up running on one machine. So that was effectively a 10 to 20x reduction in footprint. And then over time, we’ve just been improving inference technology on a lot of angles. And so we do a lot of quantization, we do a lot of, honestly, there’s a lot of just like systems work because you have all these requests coming in, you need to batch them together efficiently.
Perhaps someone heard “10x reduction in footprint” and didn’t realize that meant a reduction in bytes, not a reduction in parameters, and concluded it had a tenth as many parameters?
So they, as big-shot microsoft scientists, just decided that was good enough to stick it in a table in their paper?
“Yes, we made a mistake, we totally don’t have direct knowledge about this”
looking at huggingface models, a raw 20b is ~42gb, not a lot of space to fit big model quants. Q4KM of 70b llama fits in that (q2 is 30gb). and the smallest falcon 180b quantization is 74gb
that would make more sense while still being really impressive. not sure if someone wants to math it out, but what’s the biggest B model that would fit in that on the lowest quants (q2-q3)?
disclaimer: bees are not everything, maybe they have great dataset/money/lies
Try to experience the last best models under 20 billion parameters (Mistral, Qwen). Then be aware that the training set of those models is much smaller and less optimized than that of 3.5-turbo (I assume that the current version of 3.5-turbo is using above 10 trillion tokens of partially synthetic data). Also, I do not feel like 3.5-turbo is so good, to be honest. It’s realistic for it to be in this size range. I think that, with a maximally optimized latent space, it is possible to achieve similar results with around 10 billion parameters.
I tend to disagree that it’s less optimized. Generally more data, and more compute reduces the need for heavy data refinement, whereas smaller models with less available compute benefit more.
It’s very true that a small amount of high-quality data is better than a lot of garbage, but even better would be a large amount of high-quality data optimized in a way that we haven’t figured out yet. However, openai could be even one year ahead. Unfortunately, it is closedai now.
That’s true, but they still have less impetus to do that. They are being fairly heavily subsidized by microsoft so running costs and compute isn’t much of a concern. It’s only really at the point where more data, and more compute hits a wall, where they have to worry too much about data refinement.
20B parameters make sense. This is about a 9x reduction in parameter count and the API cost was reduced by 10x.
It’s 20b or .2b or 200000000b doesn’t bother me at all.
We haven’t approached saturation yet with tokens versus parameters on models which disclose their training. 20B is highly plausible, particularly given success of Mistral at 7B.
So does Forbes give a source for that claim or is it just the usual “the media is allowed to lie to the public” story?
They’re also morons so they’re often simply wrong.
