In plain words: By tracking how scores change as training compute grows across eleven model designs, they tested how far ahead benchmark results can be forecast. Average scores were predicted within 6 points when stretching ten times more compute, but single tasks missed by 18 points.
Abstract
We investigate large language model performance across five orders of magnitude of compute scaling in eleven recent model architectures. We show that average benchmark performance, aggregating over many individual tasks and evaluations as in the commonly-used BIG-Bench dataset, is decently predictable as a function of training compute scale. Specifically, when extrapolating BIG-Bench Hard performance across one order of magnitude in compute, we observe average absolute errors of 6 percentage points (pp). By contrast, extrapolation for individual BIG-Bench tasks across an order of magnitude in compute yields higher average errors of 18pp. Nonetheless, individual task performance remains significantly more predictable than chance. Overall, our work suggests compute scaling provides a promising basis to forecast AI capabilities in diverse benchmarks, though predicting performance in specific tasks poses challenges.
David Owen
arXiv:2401.04757 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Jan 9, 2024
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