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  • NL Seminar- Scaling unlocks emergent abilities in language models

    Thu, Feb 02, 2023 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Information Sciences Institute

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Jason Wei, Google Brain

    Talk Title: Scaling unlocks emergent abilities in language models

    Abstract: REMINDER

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    If you are an outside visitor, please inform us at nlg DASH seminar DASH host AT isi DOT edu beforehand so we will be aware of your attendance and let you in.

    In person attendance will be permitted for USC ISI faculty, staff, students only. Open to the public virtually via the zoom link and online.
    Scaling up language models has been shown to predictably improve performance on a wide range of downstream tasks. In this talk, we will instead discuss an unpredictable phenomenon that we refer to as emergent abilities of large language models. An ability is considered emergent if it is not present in smaller models but is present in larger models, which means that the ability cannot be predicted simply by extrapolating the performance of smaller models. With the popularization of large language models such as GPT-3, Chinchilla, and PaLM, dozens of emergent abilities have been discovered, including chain-of-thought prompting, which enables state-of-the-art mathematical reasoning, and instruction finetuning, which enables large language models to be usable by the broader population. The existence of such emergent phenomena raises the question of whether additional scaling could potentially further expand the range of capabilities of language models.

    Biography: Jason Wei is a senior research scientist at Google Brain. His research focuses on large language models, and his research includes chain-of-thought prompting, instruction finetuning, and emergent abilities of language models. His work has been featured in more than five Google AI blog posts, and chain-of-thought prompting was presented last year at Google I/O 2022 by Google CEO Sundar Picchai. Before Google, Jason received his AB from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

    Host: Jon May and Justin Cho

    More Info: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

    Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91012548948

    Location: Information Science Institute (ISI) - Virtual and ISI-Conf Rm#689

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/91012548948

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Pete Zamar

    Event Link: https://nlg.isi.edu/nl-seminar/

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