Thomas Scialom, Meta AI technical lead for Llama 2 and Llama 3 post-training, explains how Meta adjusted the training data curriculum dynamically while training Llama 3.
“What happened is we changed the data mix during the training of Lama three with some findings that happened in the... Training is long, so you have to do something while it's training. And what the team did, I was working on my side of motion post-training, but so the pre-training team did quite a lot of work to find some, have some new findings, improve the data mixture along the way, and they intersected before the end of the training.”
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More from Thomas Scialom
Insight
Scialom: Overtrain models beyond Chinchilla optimal to minimize inference costs
“And so, to be compute efficient at inference time, it's much better to train it much longer training time, even if it's an effort, an additional effort, than to have a bigger model. That's what I call, like, I refer to the chinchilla trap, Not that Chinchilla …”
Thomas ScialomJul 23, 2024▶ 11:44Training Llama 2, 3 & 4: The Path to Open Source AGI — with Thomas Scialom of Meta AI
Disclosure
Meta's Llama 3 post-training uses almost entirely synthetic data
“So what we did is that we generated all the data on the prompts with LAMA-II, and we applied, like, basically the last round of LAMA-II we had to kick off and start LAMA-III post-training. So Lama-free post-training doesn't have any, like, human-written answer…”
Thomas ScialomJul 23, 2024▶ 33:40Training Llama 2, 3 & 4: The Path to Open Source AGI — with Thomas Scialom of Meta AI
AssertionSupported
Scialom: Llama 3 405B is the best open-source model ever released
“At a high level, it's the best open source model ever. It's Better than GPT-IV. I mean, what version? But, by far, compared to the version originally released even now, I think there's maybe the last cloud Sonya FF-V and GPT-IV-Zero that are performing it.”
Thomas ScialomJul 23, 2024▶ 37:43Training Llama 2, 3 & 4: The Path to Open Source AGI — with Thomas Scialom of Meta AI
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Scialom: Agentic systems will yield order-of-magnitude scaling gains over pre-training
“I expect some incremental and significant progress on pre-training and post-training, but I'm really hopeful that we can gain some order of magnitude of scaling by interconnecting well models into agents as a more complex system that can do planning, that can …”
Thomas ScialomJul 23, 2024▶ 47:14Training Llama 2, 3 & 4: The Path to Open Source AGI — with Thomas Scialom of Meta AI
Opinion
Scialom: AI has minted infrastructure unicorns but few successful application companies
“I see like now a lot of fundamental stacks that are like the unicorn of today. Foundational models, foundational like clusters, data notations, things like that. There's a lot, but less successful yet, for now at least, application company. And it's hard to bu…”
Thomas ScialomJul 23, 2024▶ 1:02:32Training Llama 2, 3 & 4: The Path to Open Source AGI — with Thomas Scialom of Meta AI
Insight
Scialom: Multilinguality in LLMs emerges naturally with very little data
“Multilinguality almost emerged naturally with very, very few data, which was really surprising and not expected at all for us at the time.”
Thomas ScialomJul 23, 2024▶ 3:48Training Llama 2, 3 & 4: The Path to Open Source AGI — with Thomas Scialom of Meta AI
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