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Re:ArXiv Paper for Cerebras-GPT: Open-Source Compute-Optimal... by cs-fan-101 on Friday April 07, 2023 @06:26PM (#35487847)
Recently, we announced in this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343763#35345980) the release of Cerebras-GPT — a family of open-source GPT models trained on the Pile dataset using the Chinchilla formula. Today, we are excited to announce the availability of the Cerebras-GPT research paper on arXiv.
Re:ArXiv Paper for Cerebras-GPT: Open-Source Compute-Optimal... by krasin on Friday April 07, 2023 @09:25PM (#35489428)
Thank you for open sourcing these models!

I mentioned that the sizes of the models are relatively small (13B max). Is it an inherent limitation, or training a bigger model is possible, just has not been done in this exercise?

Re:ArXiv Paper for Cerebras-GPT: Open-Source Compute-Optimal... by runnerup on Friday April 07, 2023 @10:47PM (#35490003)
Someone else can answer this better than I, so I'll probably end up deleting this in an hour or two. But I think the purpose of this research was not to create an excellent GPT model. I believe it was to explore the scaling effects on Cerebras hardware and determine a helpful framework for compute-optimal training regimes so that customers who might use Cerebras hardware can be confident that:

1) Standard AI/ML scaling assumptions still apply on this hardware.

2) They have a starting point for hyper-parameter estimation and can get better results sooner.

Re:ArXiv Paper for Cerebras-GPT: Open-Source Compute-Optimal... by krasin on Friday April 07, 2023 @11:25PM (#35490214)
> But I think the purpose of this research was not to create an excellent GPT model.

Yes, understood. I feel that this phrase is a response to the other commenter that suggested that Cerebras should release a ChatGPT-competitive model. I don't think it's easy and I don't think it's a focus for a hardware maker, such as Cerebras.

> I believe it was to explore the scaling effects on Cerebras hardware and determine a helpful framework for compute-optimal training regimes so that customers who might use Cerebras hardware can be confident that:

> 1) Standard AI/ML scaling assumptions still apply on this hardware.

This is my point. Is it possible to train a 100B model on Cerebras hardware? 500B? In this respect, the quality is secondary to the capability for the purpose of demonstration of capabilities.

Re:ArXiv Paper for Cerebras-GPT: Open-Source Compute-Optimal... by bee_rider on Friday April 07, 2023 @10:27PM (#35489872)
> Maximal Update Parameterization (μP)

The use of μ (mu) as a sort of… pun acronym thing is pretty clever, nice one.

Re:ArXiv Paper for Cerebras-GPT: Open-Source Compute-Optimal... by groodt on Saturday April 08, 2023 @03:34AM (#35491369)
Thanks for publishing this. I quickly skimmed the paper, I saw the impressive linear scaling as you scaled to 16 nodes. How long did it take to train the various models in wall clock time?