Emergence? in large language models (revised edition)

Last year I wrote a post about emergence in AI, specifically on a paper claiming evidence for a "phase transition" in Large Language Models' ability to perform tasks they were not designed for. I found this fascinating.

That paper attracted a lot of attention, even winning an award for the best paper at the conference at which it was presented.

Well, I did not do my homework. Even before my post, another paper called into question the validity of the original paper.

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?

Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, Sanmi Koyejo

we present an alternative explanation for [the claimed] emergent abilities: that for a particular task and model family, when analyzing fixed model outputs, emergent abilities appear due to the researcher's choice of metric rather than due to fundamental changes in model behavior with scale. Specifically, nonlinear or discontinuous metrics produce apparent emergent abilities, whereas linear or continuous metrics produce smooth, continuous predictable changes in model performance.

... we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

One of the issues they suggest is responsible for the smooth behaviour is 

 the phenomenon known as neural scaling laws: empirical observations that deep networks exhibit power law scaling in the test loss as a function of training dataset size, number of parameters or compute  

One of the papers they cite on power law scaling is below (from 2017).

Deep Learning Scaling is Predictable, Empirically

Joel Hestness, Sharan Narang, Newsha Ardalani, Gregory Diamos, Heewoo Jun, Hassan Kianinejad, Md. Mostofa Ali Patwary, Yang Yang, Yanqi Zhou

The figure below shows the power law scaling between the validation loss and the size of the training data set.

They note that these empirical power laws are yet to be explained.

I thank Gerard Milburn for ongoing discussions about this topic.


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