In a world where data is the new oil, language is no longer just a human specialty. It is a powerful piece of data that is massively used in artificial intelligence and turned into the hottest topic nowadays - large language models. With the arrival of large language models, AI is now learning to communicate, understand, and generate human-like text.
These AI powerhouses like OpenAI's GPT systems, Bloom, Bard, Bert, LaMDa, LLaMa, and many more may sound and function similarly but are different enough to have their unique set of users. They are revolutionizing the way we interact with technology, shaping a future where communication with machines is as natural as chatting with a friend. From generating creative content to assisting in advanced research, large language models are weaving themselves into our daily lives.
In this article, we will explore what LLMs are, how they work, why they are in the limelight, and how they are shaping our future. This article walks you through this fascinating journey of teaching AIs human languages.
What are large language models (LLMs)?
Large language models (LLMs) are advanced AI-based models trained to process and generate human language in a way that closely mirrors natural human communication. These models leverage deep learning techniques and vast amounts of training data to develop a thorough understanding of language structures, grammar, context, and semantics. Such renowned models like GPT-3, GPT-4, LaMDA, BLOOM, LLaMA, are behind the scenes in many applications we interact with daily, such as chatbots, AI search engines, content generation tools, and much more, revolutionizing the landscape of natural language processing tasks.
But what does this mean for us? Beyond powering our daily digital interactions, LLMs are transforming industries, streamlining workflows, and even creating new artistic content. They open up exciting possibilities and redefine what we have come to expect from technology. This is not just about smarter gadgets or more efficient software; this is about shaping a future where humans and machines can communicate much like humans communicate with each other. As scary as it seems, this is not even the near future; it is happening now.
How large language models work: An in-depth explanation
If you are reading this article, you have probably used at least one type of text-generating AI tool, like ChatGPT. These tools work by learning on enormous amounts of datasets that took humans years to create. The size of this text data is Large, with the capital letter L. We are talking about well-thought neural language models that have learned terabytes of text data and require immersive computational recourses in the learning process.
All of these large models work based on transformers. Transformers are a type of neural network architecture that enable computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language by analyzing the relationships between words and phrases in text. Unlike previous models that processed language sequentially, transformers can simultaneously look at multiple sentence parts. Now, to make this idea more relatable: Imagine reading a book and understanding all the characters, plot twists, and emotions at once instead of word by word. Transformers do something similar with language, quickly grasping the meaning behind the text. This unique way of processing language makes transformers the foundation for robust computer programs that can chat, write, and think in ways that sound human.
So, what are those previous models? How did transformers "transform" the LLM game and gain the whole hype in natural language processing? What are the inner workings of transformer architecture? Keep on reading to find out.
Encoder-decoders
The encoder-decoder architecture was introduced in 1997 by Google and University of Toronto researchers and serves as the core of large language models. It solves sequence-to-sequence tasks such as machine translation, text summarization, and question answering.
As for machine translation, this is what essentially happens: An encoder takes a sentence, such as one in English, and turns it into some vector representation. This code contains all the essential information of the original sentence. Then, a decoder takes over, translating this numerical code into a new language, like German. To make sure we fully imagine this process, let us walk through the machine translation stages in encoder-decoder architecture in more detail. We will take the sentence "The weather is nice today" and consider its translation into German "Das Wetter ist heute schön." There are five main components of the encoder-decoder architecture here:
1. Input embedding: Each word in the English sentence "The weather is nice today" is converted into a unique vector through an embedding layer. These vectors hold the contextual meaning of the words.
2. Positional encoding: The transformer adds positional encodings to these embeddings, helping the model recognize the sequence of words in the sentence.
3. Encoder: The vectors then pass through multiple encoder layers in the transformer. Each encoder layer consists of a self-attention mechanism and a feed-forward neural network. The self-attention mechanism weighs the importance of each word in context, and the feed-forward network modifies the word vectors to align them with the target representation.
4. Decoder: The encoder's final output (a set of vectors representing the English sentence) is fed to the decoder. Much like the encoder, the decoder has self-attention layers and feed-forward networks. An extra attention layer in the decoder focuses on the encoder's output vectors, informing the model which parts of the input sentence are important during each step of output generation.
5. Linear and softmax layer: The output from the decoder goes through a linear layer and a softmax function. These generate a probability distribution for the predicted next word in the target language (German). The word with the highest probability is chosen, and the process continues until an end-of-sentence token is generated.
RNN-based models
In 2014, Cho et al. and Sutskever et al. introduced the idea of using encoder-decoder architecture based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for sequence-to-sequence tasks.
At these earlier times, RNNs were employed as the building blocks for both the encoder and the decoder. The encoder RNN processes the input sequence token by token, updating its hidden state at each step. The final hidden state of the encoder captures the contextual information of the entire input sequence. This hidden state serves as the initial hidden state for the decoder RNN.
The decoder RNN then takes over and generates the output sequence step by step. At each time step, the decoder RNN uses the current input token, the previous hidden state, and, optionally, the previously generated output token to predict the next token in the sequence. This process continues until an end-of-sequence token is generated or a predefined maximum length is reached.
In translation tasks, language models use both encoder and decoder components. However, these components can also function independently depending on the specific task at hand. Encoder-only models, for example, can be trained to tackle classification natural language processing tasks like sentiment analysis or sequence labeling. Bidirectional encoder representations (BERT) serve as a prime example of an encoder-only model. Decoder-only models, like the GPT family of models, BLOOM, Jurassic, and LLaMA, have become increasingly popular and capable as they have evolved and scaled. In modern times, these models demonstrate impressive performance across various tasks. Models like Bard or T5 use both encoder and decoder components and are proficient in sequence transformation tasks like summarization or paraphrasing. For such models, the input and output sequences are known to have varying lengths.
Before transformers
As we mentioned, before transformers, encoder-decoder text generation was done with RNN technology, which had two major drawbacks.
Long-term dependency: RNNs struggle with long-term dependencies, where the model needs to remember or use information from earlier time steps in the sequence for later time steps. As sequences get longer, RNNs become less capable of maintaining these dependencies. That means capturing the relationships between words at different positions in the sentence is challenging for RNNs. Let us understand with an example sentence.
'I think something was wrong with her... She looked []'
In RNN-based systems, when the model reaches the "she looked []" part, it might forget the first part of the sentence. It will look at the previous word, "look," and make its best (wrong) prediction based on the most probable word to follow, "look," which is possibly "great."
We will soon see how this issue is addressed with transformer models.
Sequential logic: RNNs process sequences one step at a time. This sequential nature of computation makes parallelization impossible, increasing training times and making them less efficient when dealing with large-scale data.
Think of it this way: When processing a sentence, an RNN reads the words one after the other, like a chain reaction. If you have a 20-word sentence, the 20th word has to wait for the computations of the preceding 19 words. This sequential processing makes parallelization impossible, leading to a longer training process.
Attention is all you need: Transformer model
These few but significant drawbacks gave rise to the transformer architecture. Transformers were born in 2017 by Google researchers, and they revolutionized the LLM industry by introducing a self-attention mechanism. The publication "Attention is All You Need" by researchers from Google and the University of Toronto and the birth of transformer mechanisms marked the beginning of the modern LLMs' aggressive growth that we have today.
Let us see how transformers solved the issues that RNNs were facing:
1. Attention mechanism: The attention mechanism within transformer architecture can learn to pay attention to the meaning of the words it is processing. In simple terms, the attention layer computes attention scores between all pairs of words in the sequence, which determine how much each word should attend to the others. Imagine you are reading a complex sentence. You will naturally focus more on some words than others to grasp the overall meaning. Similarly, attention mechanisms allow LLMs to focus on crucial input parts when generating a response, making the output more accurate and contextually relevant. In this example, the transformer model can directly relate the fact that the person is sad to the earlier information about something wrong with her, regardless of the distance between those two pieces of information.
2. Parallelization: Unlike RNNs, transformers do not process sequences step-by-step. Instead, they process all tokens in the sequence simultaneously, allowing for parallel computation. Transformer model architecture introduced the use of multi-core GPUs, which can parallel process input data, making use of much larger training datasets. This solved issue of the amount of time and computational recourses that limited RNN-based systems to work efficiently. In the extended sentence example, transformers process all 20 words simultaneously, making the computation parallel. This simultaneous processing means that all the words in our example sentence are analyzed concurrently, drastically reducing the processing time.
Transformer model lifecycle
In order to understand how large language models work, we'll also need to walk through the stages that transformer models undergo.
1. You begin everything with having a clear vision of your project. Defining the scope at the very beginning is crucial since it directly influences the size and architecture of your model. Will your LLM be a multitasker, adept at generating long-form text tasks, or will it be focused on a narrow, particular function like named entity recognition? Pinpointing your requirements can save valuable time and computational resources.
2. Once you have a clear vision for the project, it's time to decide whether to train your own model from scratch or to use an existing base model as a starting point. Generally, modifying an existing model is a common and efficient route, though there are scenarios where training from scratch might be necessary.
3. With your model ready, the next stage is performance assessment. In case the result doesn't meet your expectations, additional training may be needed. You might start with 'prompt engineering', using examples relevant to your task to guide the model. If that's not enough, fine-tuning your model could be the next step(we'll explain this in more detail soon). As models become more powerful, it's increasingly important to ensure they behave well when deployed and their outputs align with human preferences.
4. A crucial part of this process is constant evaluation. Using metrics and benchmarks allows you to track how well your model is performing and make necessary adjustments. It's an iterative process. You might find yourself cycling between prompt engineering, evaluation, and fine-tuning until you achieve the desired performance.
5. When you have a model that meets your performance needs and aligns with your expectations, it's time for deployment. Optimizing your model at this stage can ensure efficient use of computational resources and a great user experience.
6. Last, but not least, you need to consider the infrastructure required by your application. Remember, every LLM has its limitations. Preparing for these and building an infrastructure that compensates for them is essential.
Reinforcement learning from human feedback
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is one of the recent breakthroughs in machine learning that incorporates human feedback in reinforcement learning tasks. When a model performs a task or makes a prediction, people provide feedback on whether it did well or where it made mistakes. Let's say you're using an LLM to draft customer support responses. The first time, the LLM might generate a response that's too formal or lacks specific details about a product. You provide feedback indicating the issues with the response. With RLHF, the model learns from your feedback, and for the later queries, LLM has greater chances to generate a more friendly and detailed response. there's a similar inquiry, the LLM might generate a more friendly and detailed reply. As you keep providing feedback, the model becomes more adept at crafting responses that align with your company's tone and the specific needs of your customers.
Also, conventional reinforcement learning might optimize for grammatical correctness and word count. With RLHF, human evaluators can guide the model toward creativity, emotional resonance, and originality, elements that are challenging to quantify but essential for a memorable narrative. Besides conventional RL methods, there are new emerging techniques that efficiently collect the most useful feedback through activation algorithms. A famous example is active learning exploration algorithms that significantly boost LLM performance.
But the true magic of RLHF lies in its potential to combine the best of both worlds: the machine's computational prowess and the human's intuitive understanding. It is not just about making AI smarter; it is about making it wiser.
Prompt Engineering
Prompt engineering is a very big and delicious part of mastering large language models. It's a process for optimizing AI performance, and the ones who're good at it usually succeed in receiving their desired outputs from LLMs. We call the 'prompt' the input text you provide to the model, and the 'completion' is the output text generated by LLM.
You've probably done prompt engineering if you've worked with any of the large language models. It's the situation where the model does not provide the desired output on the first try. Then you revise your request several times to "explain" the model and what you expect it to return. This is essentially prompt engineering, and one pivotal strategy in prompt engineering is in-context learning.
In-context learning
In-context learning is a method for improving the prompt through specific task examples within the prompt, offering the LLM a blueprint of what it needs to accomplish. There are a few techniques involved in in-context learning.
'Zero-shot inference,' a tactic used with larger LLMs like GPT-3, incorporates your input data in the prompt without any extra examples. While this approach often works well with larger models, smaller ones may struggle to understand the task. This is just an ask-and-answer method, where your request is assumably simple enough that doesn't need extra hints for the model.
If zero-shot inference doesn't yield desired results, 'one-shot' or 'few-shot inference' can be used. These tactics involve adding one or multiple completed examples within the prompt, helping smaller LLMs perform better. For instance, to classify the sentiment of a movie review, the prompt would include the instruction, the review text, and a request for sentiment analysis at the end.
Let's be more precise. Suppose you're trying to teach your LLM to improve its ability to classify movie reviews. You might have a prompt that reads, "Classify this review: "A breathtaking masterpiece that had me at the edge of my seat.", followed by an expected completion of "Sentiment: Positive." Once you give this instruction to the model, it will deliver the desirable quality for your actual request. Now that you give the model to classify "A boring movie that took three hours of my life", it will classify the sentiment as "negative".
Remember, the performance of an LLM strongly depends on its scale. Larger models are better at handling various tasks through zero-shot inference, even those they weren't explicitly trained for. Smaller models, however, excel at tasks similar to their training. Therefore, finding the perfect balance often requires experimenting with different models and configurations.
Fine-tuning
It is important to acknowledge that for smaller models, in-context learning doesn't always work, even when five or six examples are included. Also, the 'context window'—the amount of in-context learning the model can handle—has its limitations. Any examples you include in your prompt take up valuable space in the context window, reducing the amount of room you have to include other useful information. If multiple examples don't boost the model's performance, it might be time to fine-tune your LLM. This process involves additional training using new data to improve task-specific performance.
Fine-tuning is the process that comes after pre-training, where the model is further trained (or fine-tuned) on a smaller, specific dataset. This dataset is usually related to a particular task or domain. By training on this narrower dataset, the model becomes specialized and performs better on tasks related to that specific domain.
For example, if you want a language model to answer medical questions, you might fine-tune it using medical textbooks and journals. This way, the LLM becomes better at understanding and generating responses related to medical topics.
Note that just like pre-training, full fine tuning requires enough memory and compute budget to store and process all the gradients, optimizers, and other components that are being updated during training. So you can benefit from the memory optimization and parallel computing strategies that you learned about last week.
LLMs challenges and limitations
Peering into the heart of language models, we'll have to face their challenges too. Here are a few worth mentioning:
- Hunger for data: The first big challenge is the sheer volume of data that LLMs require. They have a huge appetite for vast amounts of textual data for training. Logically, the more data they ingest, the more computational recourses they require, not to mention time. This makes the large language model training process recourse-intensive.
- Interpretability problem: Next comes the issue of interpretability. Large language models are known to function like tightly sealed vaults. It is challenging to determine why and how they generate certain outputs, as they work like a secret code without a key. OpenAI tried to address this 'black box' issue by introducing a tool that automatically identifies which parts of the model are responsible for which parts of its behavior.
- Overgeneralization: Despite being trained on extensive and diverse data, LLMs can sometimes make broad generalizations that miss out on finer nuances in language, culture, and context.
- Unintentional misinformation: LLMs lack an integrated fact-checker, making them susceptible to generating text that appears plausible but is, in reality, incorrect or misleading. This can be particularly concerning when these models are deployed in applications where accuracy is critical, such as in news reporting or medical diagnosis. This is also an issue that is being tackled and we'll soon see how.
- Catastrophic forgetting: Large language models (LLMs) can be adapted to specific tasks like generating poetry through a process called 'fine-tuning.' While fine-tuning with a relatively small dataset can make the model excel at a particular task, it may cause 'catastrophic forgetting,' where the model loses proficiency in other tasks. If retaining multitasking abilities is essential, solutions like 'multitask fine-tuning' or 'parameter efficient fine-tuning' (PEFT) can prevent this forgetting, allowing the model to be a performance-optimized specialist without losing its general abilities.
Yes, we should be careful with LLMs. They're famous people pleasers, meaning they may avoid acknowledging something that they don't know, and very possibly give you wrong information. So, being careful with LLMs is a good practice, especially for crucial cases, let's say -- medical diagnoses.
Responsible AI (challenges and ethical considerations surrounding large language models)
The world of generative artificial intelligence, especially in relation to large language models (LLMs), is undergoing crazy changes. Let us inform ourselves of some of the ethical issues revolving around AI, in more fancy terms, responsible AI.
The three fundamental challenges being tackled here are toxicity, hallucinations, and intellectual property issues.
- Toxicity: Toxicity in the context of AI refers to harmful or discriminatory language that can adversely impact specific groups, particularly marginalized or protected ones. Mitigation strategies for this challenge include meticulous curation of training data, filtering out unsuitable content, and employing a diverse team of human annotators for training. Various annotation teams help ensure a variety of perspectives are considered, thereby reducing the risk of bias in the AI models.
- Hallucinations: Hallucinations, on the other hand, are instances where AI produces baseless or untrue outputs. The thing is that AI sometimes tries to fill in the gaps where there is some missing data, resulting in AI starting to "hallucinate." This phenomenon can lead to outputs that are misleading or incorrect. User education plays a crucial role in managing this challenge. Users need to be informed about the realities of AI technology and the potential for hallucinations. Other potential solutions include cross-referencing AI outputs with verified data sources, developing methods for tracing back outputs to their original training data, and clearly defining the intended and unintended uses of AI.
- Intellectual property issues: These arise when AI models generate content that could infringe on existing copyrights or plagiarize pre-existing work. The solution to this problem requires a combination of technological innovation, policy-making, and legal interventions. Emerging concepts like machine unlearning, which refers to the reduction or removal of protected content or its influence on AI outputs, and protective measures like content filtering and blocking, can help mitigate this issue.
To responsibly implement and use generative AI models, it is crucial to define specific use cases, continually assess risks, and regularly evaluate performance based on both data and the system. It is important to remember that creating AI is a continuous, iterative cycle requiring diligent monitoring and improvement over time. Additionally, it is crucial to have clear governance policies and hold every stakeholder accountable throughout the AI lifecycle to ensure responsible AI use.
Major players in the field of large language models
There is a huge amount of cash in generative AI and large language models (LLMS). The funding amounts are crazy, and the competition is viral. Let's see who holds the first positions in the LLM race.
OpenAI is the pioneer, innovator, and main player of LLMs. Founded in 2015, OpenAI accumulated a crazy amount of $11.3 billion of funding by June 2023. It gave birth to the hype around ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and marked the beginning of enterprises' current obsession with LLMs. All of OpenAI's GPT models, especially the recent ones (GPT-4 Turbo, GPT agents, Q* algorithm), have gained massive attention, and their rapid advancements are both promising and scary. Not only do hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT for their regular office tasks or work or hobbies, but hundreds of businesses adopt GPT systems into their products. The world is boiling in the pot of generative AI and LLMs, let's see who are some other firms who have their say in LLMs.
Meta AI (formerly Facebook AI) is an open-source player with models like LLama and LLama2 that are designed for non-commercial usage. With open-source models, Meta aimed to give businesses, startups, entrepreneurs, and researchers access to tools developed at a scale that would be challenging to build themselves, backed by computing power they might not otherwise access, will open up a world of opportunities for them to experiment, innovate in exciting ways, and ultimately benefit from economically and socially.
xAI launched its language model named Grok AI on November 4th. Grok is a real-time language model that distinguishes itself with a personality that has humor and sarcasm. It's trained on content from X and uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technique to provide fresh and up-to-date information. xAI took a very bold step toward language models, building a model that doesn't conform to the moral and ethical constraints that are programmed for most other language models. It can go wild and vulgar, depending on what is requested.
Anthropic is one of the youngest among these players and managed to raise $1.5 billion after being established in just 2021. Its founders are former OpenAI employees, and one thing that primarily sets their model(Claude) apart is their new technique called “constitutional AI” -- a system where AI supervises other AIs. In other terms, here human intervention is minimized to just setting some rules and guides, the rest of it is all AI. Constitutional AI is about training models for a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement with 0 human labeling involved. Note that this novel technique is liked by a lot of users from Quora, Robin AI, and many more.
Cohere was founded in 2019 and has $435 million in funding. One of the founders of Cohere, Aidan Gomez, is the co-author of the revolutionary "Attention is all you need" paper that we talked about earlier. “We’re differentiated as the independent, cloud-agnostic AI platform for enterprises,” says Kon who joined Cohere in early 2023. “We are solely focused on enabling our customers to create proprietary LLM capabilities leveraging their data and creating strategic differentiation and business value.” For the future, Cohere plans to build models that perform tasks for customers that a real assistant would do -- schedule calls/meetings, book flights, and file expense reports.
Inflection AI, led by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and founding member of DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman, recently landed a $1.3 billion investment to build more 'personal AI'. The investors were led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and new investor Nvidia. This funding was used to build their first product, the personal AI assistant PI. Suleyman says that their aim is to make human-computer conversations as natural as possible, where humans won't need to simplify their ideas in order to communicate with a machine. “Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes. This is truly an inflection point,” Suleyman said in a canned statement. Inflection has deep ties with Microsoft and Nvidia(with Microsoft being a big investor in OpenAI as well), a good amount of cash to run and operate what they need to and Mustafa seems to be pretty confident about it.
Adept, a startup co-founded by former DeepMind, OpenAI and Google engineers and researchers, has a similar concept with Inflection -- AI that can automate any software process. This player has $415 million in funding and ironically empty website with no product yet. On their website, you can join the waitlist to get informed once the product is ready. Founders say that the model will be able to respond to commands like “generate a monthly compliance report” or “draw stairs between these two points in this blueprint” by using existing software like Airtable, Photoshop, Tableau and Twilio to complete the tasks.
Microsoft is the enterprise player in this bioling LLM pot. It partnered with and funded LLM players like Meta, OpenAI, Adept, and has its big part in the game. Microsoft's Bing uses ChatGPT, but unlike this model, Bing uses Internet and real-time data(while ChatGPT's responses include data up to 2021). Bing uses ChatGPT, but unlike OpenAI’s model, it has internet access and performs like an AI-driven search engine. Unlike ChatGPT, which has 2021 as the knowledge cut-off date, Bing provides up-to-date responses. Bing allows 20 replies per conversation, suggests follow-up questions and has three conversation styles(more precise, creative and balanced).
Mistral AI is an emerging leader in the AI industry, and has recently closed up €400 million in their Series A funding round with groundbreaking models like Mixtral 8x7B. This investment escalates the company's valuation to an impressive $2 billion, signaling a solid entry into the competitive AI landscape. The funding round, led by the renowned Andreessen Horowitz, also saw participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and many other prominent investors, including Salesforce and BNP Paribas.
Google recently released Gemini, with CEO Sundar Pichai announcing that Gemini is the "most capable and general model yet." It demonstrates some impressive results, already competing with the existing powerful models from OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft. Gemini is multimodal, comes in 3 sizes, and is incorporated into Google's AI-powered chatbot Bard and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones.
Cognition AI is a new player in the game that takes software development into a new, automated stage. Cognition's founders, the world's best competitive programmers, recently rolled out Devin AI—the first AI software engineer. Devin successfully passes top companies' interview tasks, completes Upwork projects, and demonstrates 3x the performance of Claude 2 (former best performer) for resolving GitHub issues in real-world problems. Devin's launch has got the tech town talking, promising revolutionary changes in software development.
These are just a few of the many companies and organizations working on large language models. Other companies like HuggingFace, BigScience, StabilityAI, Cerebras also have their parts in this race. The field is rapidly evolving, and new players are constantly emerging.
These are just a few of the many companies and organizations working on large language models. Other companies like HuggingFace, BigScience, StabilityAI, Cerebras also have their parts in this race. It's worth mentioning that new techniques like FuseLLM integrate the strengths of different language models and fuse them together. This fusion results in a new, more robust model that outperforms the capabilities of each individual model. That being said, it's not just about new players entering the industry now and then; there are also methods to combine them, creating more opportunities in the field of large language models.
Future trends and developments in large language models
Despite being popular and massively used, large language models have room for further improvement and development. We collected a few trends in LLMs that are waiting for us in the future and will improve the large language model game.
1. Synthetic data:
With more concerns about privacy, synthetic data is becoming a hot topic. This data isn't collected from real-world scenarios but made from scratch. Using synthetic data, we can worry less about privacy issues. This could change how we use AI in industries that require large amounts of simulation, like video games or disaster response training.
Here is an example of a language model that Google researchers created that uses self-generated solutions as target outputs.
2. Fact-checking:
There is a lot of information out there, and not all of it is accurate. Another potential improvement of large language models can be automated fact-checking. We are moving towards a future where AI can tell us in real-time whether what we are reading is accurate or not. This could help us fight against the spread of false information and even spot deepfakes.
Currently, Google's REALM and Facebook's RAG are two of the most promising technologies that address the factual accuracy and reliability issue of LLMs. Besides this, one of the latest versions of GPT, WebGPT, uses Microsoft Bing to browse requests much like a human being would do. It incorporates citations in its responses, making the generated responses more accurate and reliable. In fact, WebGPT outperformed ChatGPT and other technologies in terms of response accuracy.
When the model covers information from the internet in its output, it includes citations, enabling individuals to authenticate the source of information. Initial research results on WebGPT are promising, with the model outperforming all GPT-3 models regarding the percentage of accurate responses and the amount of truthful and informative answers provided.
3. Expert models:
But what if a model was able to call upon only the most relevant subset of its parameters to respond to a given query? This is the basic concept behind sparse expert models.
Instead of utilizing all of the parameters within a large language model, expert models use a subset of these parameters that best fit the given query, which makes them computationally less demanding. This is the concept of expert models, in short. They are called experts primarily because they are very good at specific areas, like law or medicine. If the prompt requests detailed information related to medical imaging in German, only these experts will be activated, the rest remaining inactive.
Some of these sparse expert models are Google's Switch Transformer (1.6 trillion parameters), Google's GLaM (1.2 trillion parameters), and Meta's Mixture of Experts(MoE) & Mixture of Tokens(MoT) (1.1 trillion parameters).
There we have it: synthetic data, fact-checking, and expert models are three major trends in AI development, redefining what is possible with AI.
Large language models in SuperAnnotate
SuperAnnotate's LLM annotation tool is built on a simple principle: every project is unique and deserves tools that can be tailored to its needs. Our LLM annotation platform emphasizes this through its customizable nature, allowing users to build their own models with the versatile toolset that we provide.
Here is what sets us apart:
- High customizability for very diverse use cases.
- Integration of reinforcement learning with human feedback within the tool.
- Built-in model comparison and evaluation system that makes it easier to judge the effectiveness of different models.
- Data security is paramount. We have invested heavily in ensuring the best data governance practices.
- Have a custom API? You can seamlessly integrate it with our platform, giving you more control and flexibility.
At SuperAnnotate, we prioritize functionality and user needs, ensuring every LLM project achieves its objectives. In fact, it is hard to think of an LLM use case that SuperAnnotate's tool will not cover, and if you think of one, give it a try.
Key takeaways
Large language models are all the rage today in the AI world and for a good reason. As we have explored their inner workings, challenges, future trends, and key players driving their evolution, one thing becomes clear: LLMs have the potential to advance even more. In this wildly evolving journey, SuperAnnotate recognizes the pivotal role of LLMs in natural language processing applications. Our creation of an exceptionally adaptable tool underscores the practicality and versatility of LLM integration for diverse businesses.
The fusion of human and machine capabilities is forging the horizons in the field of language and cognition. We are left impatient to see what is yet to come in the world of large language models.
