Better Language Models and Their Implications
This kind of "blocking-and-tackling" work is important.<p>The authors take a well-known architecture, the Transformer[a], configure it with a progressively larger number of parameter, train it to predict the next word conditioned on previous text, using a large dataset consisting of 40GB of text scraped from the Web, and test each trained model on a range of zero-shot transfer-learning tasks.<p>Remarkably, the performance of a Transformer in the tested tasks improves <i>log-linearly</i> with the number of parameters, suggesting that even the largest model tested, with 1.5B parameters, still <i>underfits</i> 40GB of text.<p>This is <i>compelling evidence</i> that we do NOT need new architectures, NOR new kinds of training objectives, NOR new theories, for better language modeling!  We can get better language modeling simply by increasing model capacity (i.e., by adding more parameters to existing models), which becomes easier and simpler to do as hardware continues to improve over time.<p>Great work.<p>PS. In case it's not clear: I'm not saying we should suddenly stop searching for new, better ideas and architectures. That would be silly. Please don't attack a straw-man :-)<p>[a] <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762</a>