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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

author here! thanks for submitting - if you dont mind i will copy over some personal highlights from my twiter post (https://x.com/latentspacepod/status/1809300018907828285):

Special interest topics we touched on:

- why encoder-decoder is not actually that different than decoder-only architecture (Reka is notably enc-dec vs GPT which is dec-only)

- why the "Noam architecture" is All You Need

- The chaotic vs stable periods of spinning up GPU clusters ( per this great post I submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39609997 )

- The NeurIPS Mirage paper vs Jason/Yi's Emergent Abilities paper

- The Efficiency Misnomer - reminder on Arvind Narayanan's recent callout that "active params" isn't actually the same thing as lower cost, and also not the same thing as faster inference

- Echoing Founders Fund's skepticism that Open Source AI can have any real lasting impact

please AMA! (Yi will see this)

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Thank you, those insights are invaluable! This is a specific and potentially dumb question and I completely understand if you can't answer it!

The practical motivation for MoEs is very clear but I do worry about loss of compositional abilities (that I think just emerge from superposed representations?) that some tasks may require, especially with the many experts phenomenon we're seeing. This is an observation from smaller MoE models (with like top-k gating etc.) that may or may not scale, that denser models trained to the same loss tend to perform complex tasks "better".

Intuitively, do you think MoEs are just another stopgap trick we're using while we figure out more compute, better optimizers or could there be enough theoretical motivation to justify their continued use? If there isn't, perhaps we need to at least figure out "expert scaling laws" :)

thanks for the thoughtful qtn! yeah i dont have the background for this one, you'll have to ask an MoE researcher (which Yi is not really either as i found out on the pod). it does make sense that on a param-for-param basis MoEs would have less compositional abilities, but i have yet to read a paper (mostly my fault, bc i dont read MoE papers that closely, but also researcher fault, in that they're not incentivized to be rigorous about downsides of MoEs) that really identified what these compositional abilities are that MoEs are affected. if you could, for example, identify subcategories of BigBench or similar that require compositional abilities, then we might be able to get hard evidence on this question. i'm not yet motivated enough to do this myself but it'd make a decent small research question.

HOWEVER i do opine that MoEs are kiiind of a stopgap (both on the pod and on https://latent.space/p/jan-2024) - definitely a validated efficiency/sparsity technique (esp see deepseek's moe work if you havent already, with >100 experts https://buttondown.email/ainews/archive/ainews-deepseek-v2-b...) but mostly a oneoff boost you get on the single small dense expert equivalent model rather than comparable to the capabilities of a large dense model of the same param count (aka I expect a 8x22B MoE to never outperform a 176B dense model ceteris paribus - which is difficult to get a like-for-like comparison on bc these things are expensive, also partially because usually the MoE is just upcycled instead of trained from scratch, and partially because the routing layer is deepening every month). so perhaps to TLDR there is more than enough evidence and practical motivation to justify their continued use (i would go so far as to say that all inference endpoints incl gpt4 and above should be MoEs) but they themselves are not really an architectural decision that matters for the next quantum leap in capabilities

micro take on the open vs closed ai debate:

most of the progress and experimentation is done by complete ai laypersons on civitai, comfy ui and silly tavern.

Consider this: we have hit the top of the S curve when it comes to compute and data.

The only way forward is brute force manual experimentation.

And this is done completely without financial or academic incentives.

The big advancements will come by a thousand little steps and comfy ui workflows made by an anon NEET in the chase for the perfect AI waifu. Not by some ai research lab or startup.

we will see break throughs when it comes to gaussian splatting and inpainting in 3d. We will be able to create our own 3d fantasy worlds and wear vr glasses all the time. The metaverse meme is surprisingly becoming real.

But it wont happen with a grand splash or a big product announcement. It will happen quietly in some anon NEET's cave.

Mark my words :D

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