[HN Gopher] Learnings from fine-tuning LLM on my Telegram messages
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Learnings from fine-tuning LLM on my Telegram messages
Author : furiousteabag
Score : 122 points
Date : 2023-11-27 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asmirnov.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (asmirnov.xyz)
| NoraCodes wrote:
| A meta-comment, but, what is the difference between "learnings"
| and "lessons"? Why use the former when we have the latter?
| bigdict wrote:
| learnings = lessons learned
| Jolter wrote:
| Lessons may be given, but are not necessarily learned.
| c0pium wrote:
| Gotta earn those fat management consultant fees somehow. I'm
| sure there's a whole team at McKinsey doing nothing but
| inventing new ways to say the same things.
| fl7305 wrote:
| In Swedish, there's a commonly used word "lardomar" which is
| a direct match for "learnings".
|
| But where the Swedish word sounds natural in that language,
| "learnings" just sounds wrong in English, even though it
| apparently is technically correct.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Learnings implies a report of your own experience; lessons
| implies something prepared as teaching material for the
| audience. (In the context of the title sentence anyway.)
| xanderlewis wrote:
| 'Lessons' to me also seems to carry a sense of regret, as in
| 'things (we) got wrong'. 'Learnings' is a more obscure word
| that I would take to mean something more neutral: literally
| 'things (I've) learnt'.
| kagol wrote:
| Perhaps "findings" over "learnings", based on your
| description?
| klooney wrote:
| I've always associated it with Indian English, possibly it's a
| dialect thing that's spread from that community.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| Maybe it's Kazakh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borat
|
| ;-)
| swatcoder wrote:
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings
|
| Beyond what's noted there (contemporary business jargon),
| English is diffused across the globe and has many regional
| variations that are different than class-signalling/formal
| American and British usage. As we all encounter each other
| online, it's not always worth over-analyzing word choice when
| you can understand the intent.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think when you ask what the difference between two phrases
| is, people will really dig down to try and find a difference.
|
| IMO in this context it is basically shorthand for "things I
| learned/lessons learned while tuning LLM...," and either would
| be fine. It is sort of an informal list of stuff the author
| learned.
|
| In my experience (nothing special, just another native speaker)
| "lessons from <event>" is the more typical American (at least)
| English phrase. But it is sort of close to "Lessons on."
| "Lessons on" would imply more refined material that is more
| narrowly focused on teaching. So I wonder if the author decided
| they just didn't want to worry about any confusion, or the
| possibility that they might misuse a phrase.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I think it's new. I've only heard it in the last few years.
| amccollum wrote:
| This usage of "learnings", while certainly more common in
| "business jargon" today, was used by Shakespeare:
|
| https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....
| nescioquid wrote:
| Some words in Shakespeare have different meanings today or
| have simply left standard usage. I don't think the presence
| of a word in Shakespeare means it is de facto good style to
| use today.
|
| From a correctness stand-point, I think a descriptionist
| would be satisfied with an attested usage, especially from
| such a source. From a style point of view, I still find
| myself feeling embarrassed for the author when I encounter
| this usage (which is my own problem).
| catlover76 wrote:
| I assumed the author was a non-native English speaker
| haltist wrote:
| Great example of immortal digital avatars. This is just a simple
| personal avatar but it is possible to make technological gods
| with the same techniques. All that's needed is scale and $80B.
| u385639 wrote:
| Great post. I wonder how much this can improve if you RAG-ify a
| diverse set of contextual data, for example calendar, meals,
| recent conversations from the real world, etc.
|
| It's also interesting that blia was translated to 'damn'. :)
| furiousteabag wrote:
| I think incorporating knowledge from other apps is a good next
| step because the model definitely lacks the context of what is
| going on right now. The nature of instant messaging is that
| most of the messages are about what is happening right now or
| what will happen in the near future, so past communication
| history does not help much.
| goda90 wrote:
| We're probably quite some time off from the bio-mimetic android
| part, but we're feeling closer and closer to the AI replacement
| avatar from the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back"[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
| thefourthchime wrote:
| This part caught my eye:
|
| "Using a half-precision FSDP full shard with a 1024 sequence
| length and a micro batch size of 2 required 63GB of VRAM on each
| of the eight A100 80 GB GPUs. The training, lasting three epochs,
| took just 20 minutes. The total cost for the VM was $8.88 per
| hour, resulting in $3, not including the time for experiments and
| bug fixes."
|
| I wondered where you could rent cycles on a machine like that, a
| quick Google found that p4d.24xlarge on AWS is available, while
| the on-demand cost is $20.1755 per hour, the Spot is only $8.99
| (I guess it's gone up?)
|
| Cool to know I could fine-tune for only ~$3.
| furiousteabag wrote:
| I've been using vast.ai for a very long time. It is like a GPU
| marketplace, where people rent and lease GPUs. There are a lot
| of VMs with 4090, and beasts like 8xA100 80GB are also
| available from time to time.
| skerit wrote:
| I've used vast.ai to do some fine-tuning just a few days ago.
| It is indeed pretty great, though some servers fail to start
| up properly, or have some weird performance issues. I also
| wish they had more templates to try.
| siquick wrote:
| Excuse the ignorance but are you using these instances to fine
| tune a "fresh install" of a model, and then when you've
| finished fine tuning it do you download the whole model from
| the instance for use somewhere else?
| jsight wrote:
| I think Tensordock and vast.ai are cheaper than AWS. Lambda
| labs can be as well, but they seem to only have reserved
| instances now.
| cosmojg wrote:
| runpod.io is another good-and-cheap option
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| "Learnings" is such a horrible word
| 123sereusername wrote:
| "Learnings" While it might be legal, Learnings is a terrible
| abuse of the English language.
| ryanklee wrote:
| This is a ridiculous, arbitrary judgment that has nothing to do
| with anything even remotely related to this post. This type of
| pedantry is low-brow and annoying.
| aerhardt wrote:
| It's also plainly wrong, because "learnings" is perfectly
| commonplace.
| amccollum wrote:
| Take it up with Shakespeare?
|
| https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view....
| sfink wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker from the US, and a pedant who
| hates "ask" as a noun, "workshop" as a verb, and "performant"
| as a word. But I don't get the hate for "learnings" here.
| What's wrong with it? "Lessons" connotes negativity, "stuff I
| learned" doesn't naturally fit into many sentences, and "useful
| information gleaned" can be shoved right back up the tightly
| puckered ass it came out of.
|
| What's the problem? That title is exactly the way I would have
| written it.
| kagol wrote:
| I always thought of "learning" as an uncountable noun.
| korhojoa wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's your take on how to write "this item
| requires repair"?
|
| "It needs repaired" is something I've seen, which to me is
| confusing, because it seems like "to be" is missing. When did
| "needs" run away from the words it's been associated with
| before?
| swatcoder wrote:
| They wrote this for you, I think:
|
| https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/needs-washed
| esafak wrote:
| So you're saying "needs" is not doing the needful.
| pweezy wrote:
| This is a regionalism in parts of the US, which I've seen
| described as Pittsburgh and its surroundings.
|
| I come across it often and struggle with cognitive
| dissonance every time - I know of the regionalism but it
| feels so strongly like a glaring grammatical error.
|
| I see/hear the specific phrase "needs fixed" most often.
| gwern wrote:
| > My data collator ensures that the loss is only calculated based
| on someone's response. Predicting who will speak next is
| relatively straightforward, and we don't want the model to focus
| on learning that. Therefore, parts of the conversation where the
| loss is calculated are highlighted in bold.
|
| If it's so easy, then you don't need to remove it. The model will
| solve it easily and focus on everything else. At best, you save
| some parameters and compute, at worst, you are damaging its
| ability to learn important things like conversational skills or
| modeling people. When it comes to LLMs, more is more, and trying
| to hand-engineer the dataset or think _for_ the LLM can backfire
| in very subtle and difficult to diagnose ways.
|
| > Ok, it is capable of forming coherent sentences. The most
| noticeable problem is its lack of awareness regarding the context
| of the conversations which leads to bland and generic replies.
| The messages lacked any distinct style, feeling quite basic... >
| > Conversations have become more interesting and engaging,
| although there's still a risk of losing context. Russian language
| performance has improved, but errors still occur. I believe that
| before fine-tuning for a specific task with limited data, like
| mine, it would be beneficial to first fine-tune the model
| unsupervised on a large corpus of Russian texts. Additionally,
| incorporating common conversation partners' names as separate
| tokens might enhance the quality. I wouldn't say it has turned
| out to be significantly better than LoRA. It might be more
| effective to focus solely on a single person and calculate the
| loss based only on my responses (or someone else's), instead of
| trying to learn about each and every conversational partner.
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