6 months since GPT-4 release

[dmm]

A good way to mark this occasion is to try to read a new paper which seems to be a major breakthrough in understanding and harnessing the magic of Transformers:

"Uncovering mesa-optimization algorithms in Transformers"

"we demonstrate that minimizing a generic autoregressive loss gives rise to a subsidiary gradient-based optimization algorithm running inside the forward pass of a Transformer. This phenomenon has been recently termed mesa-optimization"

 

"Moreover, we find that the resulting mesa-optimization algorithms exhibit in-context few-shot learning capabilities,
independently of model scale. Our results therefore complement previous reports characterizing the
emergence of few-shot learning in large-scale LLMs"

 

Comments

[dmm]

Page 4. The material here is very interesting.

It's a great paper, just poorly written, a lot of work to parse the details.

But even a superficial level of understanding of this paper can be quite useful, and one can gradually understand the details better as needed...