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The a16z Show

Safety in Numbers: Keeping AI Open

The a16z Show

a16z

Software Eating The World, Science, Technology, Innovation, Culture, Disruption, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.21.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Arthur Mensch is the co-founder of Mistral and the co-author of Deepmind’s pivotal 2022 "Chinchilla" paper. In September 2023, Mistral released Mistral-7B, an advanced open-source language model that has rapidly become the top choice for developers. Just this week, they introduced a new mixture of experts model – Mixtral — that’s already generating significant buzz among AI developers. As the battleground around large language models heats up, join us for a conversation with Arthur as he sits down with a16z General Partner Anjney Midha. Together, they delve into the misconceptions and opportunities around open source; the current performance reality of open and closed models; and the compute, data, and algorithmic innovations required to efficiently scale LLMs.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I think the battle is for the neutrality of the technology.

0:04.0

This is the story of humanity, making knowledge access more fluid.

0:08.0

Basically in 2021, every paper made this mistake.

0:12.0

It means that we're only trusting the team of... one, every paper made this mistake.

0:12.8

It means that we're only trusting the team of large companies

0:15.8

to figure out ways of addressing these problems.

0:18.9

All of the people that joined us as well,

0:20.9

deeply regretted because we think that we are definitely not at the end of the story.

0:25.4

As it turns out, if you look at the history of software, the only way we did software collaboratively

0:29.6

is through open source.

0:30.5

So why change the recipe? Scaling loss.

0:34.0

These underpin the success of large language models today,

0:37.0

but the relationship between data sets, compute,

0:40.0

and the number of parameters was not always clear.

0:43.0

But in 2022, a pivotal paper came out,

0:46.0

often referred to as Chinchilla

0:48.0

that changed the way that many people in the research community

0:51.0

thought about that very calculus,

0:52.0

demonstrating that

0:53.4

data sets were actually more important than just the sheer size of the model.

0:57.4

One of the key authors behind that paper was Arthur Metched, who was working at Deep Mind at the time.

1:04.0

Now earlier this year, Arthur banded together with Giam Lampo and Timothy Lequois, two researchers

...

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