Google Brain staff research scientist Kelvin Guu discusses early findings during the development of BERT that inspired research into retrieval-augmented generation.
“I think one of the things that became very apparent early on when playing with BERT was unlike all the prior generations of models, it had a large amount of world knowledge that we didn't deliberately encode into it. It wasn't in, you know, the fine tuning data. It was all within pre-training.”
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Insight
Guu: Without Attribution, Distinguishing LLM Generalization From Memorization Is Impossible
“Without being able to track that down, we'll never know if these models are generalizing or just kind of cleverly patching together what they know.”
Kelvin GuuMay 4, 2023▶ 15:53No Priors Ep. 15 | With Kelvin Guu, Staff Research Scientist, Google Brain
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Guu: Fundamental AI Advances May Make Agent Workflow Engineering Obsolete
“But it's quite possible that fundamental advances could come along and this kind of workflow hacking or workflow engineering could go the same way as feature engineering or specialized architectures.”
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AssertionSupported
Guu: FLAN Demonstrated Zero-Shot Generalization After Multi-Task Training on 100 Tasks
“What we were able to show was that if you train on a hundred tasks, if we then show the model a new 101 task, it will be able to adapt to that without having seen that particular task before.”
Kelvin GuuMay 4, 2023▶ 10:39No Priors Ep. 15 | With Kelvin Guu, Staff Research Scientist, Google Brain
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Guu: AI Agents Relying Purely on Explicit Reasoning May Fail to Scale
“That's something that seems to be missing from these autonomous agents right now. Everything is explicit reasoning, and at some point that might not scale or that might become brittle.”
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Opinion
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“And since then we've encountered many interesting challenges on top of that idea that I would say even in, in the sort of systems you see today, these tool using models that issue Google searches or provide citations, they still face some challenges in terms o…”
Kelvin GuuMay 4, 2023▶ 3:06No Priors Ep. 15 | With Kelvin Guu, Staff Research Scientist, Google Brain
Insight
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“So it's actually been a case where I think more and more the benefits of a retrieval augmented model are for modularity. For personal information that you might not want in the main model, for adapting to, say, like an enterprise customer that has special info…”
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