Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

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So excited for this release. In the wake of AI Dungeon's downfall, having GPT-Neo to fallback on has been a saving grace. While the 6B model is nowhere near as good as the original AI Dungeon, which used OpenAI's 175B model, it was at least serviceable unlike the "gentled" AI Dungeon. And you could run it locally or through Colab, which was really cool. I ended up using it through NovelAI, since they've spent a lot of time fine-tuning the model and adding a plethora of features that end up improving the overall output. (NovelAI's interface is like AI Dungeon on steroids!) But there is a vibrant community of Colab notebooks and other tools for DIYers surrounding the GPT-Neo model.

That said, besides being overall "dumber" than 175B GPT-3, the 6B model was missing a critical feature: prompting. 175B GPT-3 could be "prompted" to write things. For example, you could give it "Write a story about cyberpunk gnomes:" and it would go on to do just that, all on its own. GPT-Neo didn't really have that capability in my experience. The only way to get it to reliably write such a story is to begin writing it yourself, at which point GPT-Neo could help to continue the story.

So I'm excited to see not just how much "smarter" Eleuther's new 20B model is, but also if it has attained that coveted prompting ability. Given the non-linear relationship between parameters and loss, my hopes are high.

P.S. NovelAI recently added the Fairseq 13B model to their repertoire. I haven't had a chance to try it personally, but I've seen positive things about it. My bet is on GPT-NeoX-20B being better still.

The "prompting" ability you're referring to is called "instruction following", and here are some descriptions of it.

https://openai.com/blog/instruction-following/

I think the differences are more in the training data used, than in the nature of the model itself. So you could probably train your own instruction-following model on top of this raw 20B model.

What was AI Dungeon's downfall? Can't find much about it.

tl;dr AI Dungeon was required to add additional content filters after it went too off the rails, which caused community backlash.

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-fueled-dungeon-game-got-much-...

It was more than that. They also significantly downgraded the model. I didn't follow the details, but IIUC Dragon used the 175B directly initially, then I think they went down a model size at Open AI's behest. Finally, when Open AI announced pricing, AI Dungeon had to downgrade the model further.

But yes, the content filtering got out of hand too. I was initially fine with it, as its proposed intention was to filter out really illegal stuff, like underage content. I rarely hit the filter. But then they tweaked it at some point and I was triggering it constantly on otherwise benign stuff.

And they broke features constantly.

When I unsubbed the state of AID was broken features, micro-transactions, terrible AI model, and a glitchy, puritanical content filter.

The plus side is that it made the puny GPT-Neo model look like a godsend.

really illegal stuff, like underage content

Wait, isn't this output just text? How is a text AI generating illegal content?

The content may not be illegal to possess, but if it's obscene, then it can be illegal to sell it, produce it with the intention of selling it, transport it, distribute it, and so on.

Could it really? I was under the impression that unless you incite someone to commit crimes (or confess to crimes), the story would be covered under "art" and therefore protected. It's just text after all. Where does the limit for "obscene" go?

It's very funny to imagine picking up a romance novel and making it illegal by scrawling "by the way the girl was actually 16 the whole time" on the inside of the back cover.

In the U.S., it's called the Miller test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test

Wow, I had no idea, that sounds really bad. The whole book banning debacle now makes sense and seems legal. That test seems to me to give way for courts to basically judge however they want, as all those three criteria are very subjective.

Also first time I hear about "patently offensive" and now I'm laughing. Thanks!

It wouldn't be illegal in the US, but it would be in many other countries.

It’s called thoughtcrime

https://www.quora.com/Do-thought-crimes-exist-in-U-S-law

Miller v California has been undermined so severely by subsequent decisions that it basically doesn't apply anymore.

Quora is quite unhelpful in any context.

I believe they're currently using AI21's 178B Jumbo model for Dragon. Since they're completely off of OpenAI now, the content filter is much more lax.

It should be noted that the content filters were implemented really badly. Like, saying “my ten year old truck” would suddenly stop your story in its tracks, lots of things would trigger it. Plus, people became uncomfortable with the idea that the AI Dungeon employees were potentially reading your stories at any time.

You can try the model out for free at goose.ai after making an account and going to the sandbox section.

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