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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4271 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 3, 2023

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I suspect it, too, is a gimped/lossily accelerated version, with the full one to be released under the «DV» brand as part of their Foundry product. I may be wrong, however, and ultimately this PR-driven nomenclature is making less and less sense, they have trained like a dozen major models at this point, and more finetunes. Same story with Google's PaLM.

More importantly, quantity has a quality all of its own. DV offers a context window of 32k tokens. If the model can be cheaply ran with such enormous contexts, this will more than compensate for some intellectual deficiency in the context-sparse text-prediction mode. You have seen effects of StableDiffusion mega-detailed prompting, and of prompt prefixes that amount to a single page – now imagine 20 pages of precise specification, few-shot examples, chain-of-thought induction, explicit caveats for every failure mode discovered in testing; basically a full employee's manual. Writing and testing these megaprompts may become a new job for ex-middle managers who have suddenly transformed into leaf nodes of the org chart – for a short while.

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