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Comment by bigdict | Hacker News Reader

Jesus H. Christ, first time I see a collaboration this big on a ML paper. How does a team like that even come together? This isn't the LHC.

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RWKV has been running in public (relatively obscure to other models) for the past 2 years

Mostly lead by a single person (blink). This community consist mostly of people outside the academia / big VC tech scene

When eleutherAI offered to help us with writing the paper. Various key folks banded together for the paper, as it’s what seems to be a very strong alternative to transformers

This does not mean everyone in the discord was credited.

The requirements are for significant contributions to the paper. typically several paragraphs long worth of drafting and revisions

Just doing a line of grammar change or a single benchmark is not enough

AKA: no one here is incentivised to fight for bigger ownership, no promotion or KPI or pay was on the line

If you think this is wild, see the PaLM 2 paper with 2.5 pages of 2 column attributions.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10403.pdf

Page 28.

That is wild, almost like film credits

No, the Bloom paper is wild: 2.5 pages of author names written with no spacing, I counted 472 authors after deduplication. PaLM 2 has only 181 authors. ;)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.05100.pdf

Have you seen the author list of DeepSpeech2? https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595

They're a group of volunteers who came together over Discord.

I think it's just, everyone in their discord channel.

What channel? I have an application for sequence models I think might be novel, and I'd like to be able to get credit and help research it if possible. Probably somebody has already done it, but I cannot search well enough to find related literature.

Write it and submit it yourself. Sole authorship is given more weight these days for whatever reason. In a multi author publication, even if you are first author or listed as equal contribution, if there is a more famous person on the paper everyone will assume they did it.

Write it and submit it to who? I'm not familiar enough with the field to find any prior work or related work.

find the most closely related paper that you know of, even if it's not very close, and submit your idea to the same journal that published that other idea

> What channel?

https://discord.gg/qt9egFA7ve

Our discord servers (a primary one, a spin-off for RWKV, another spinoff for BioML, etc) have tens of thousands of people between them :) So not quite everyone. But this was a community effort with a public call for contributions

Are you the Stella from the Acknowledgements section? Are you in one of those spinoffs like BioML, or you aren't on the author list because you have some conflict with your work where you can't legally do something because of intellectual property laws or license things or NDA? Also when you talk about 'our discord servers' which ones do you mean? Is it ones run by Eleuther?

Yes I am (apparently) in the acknowledgments. I was not an author on the paper because I didn’t have time to contribute too much. I also try to err on the side of not being added to papers, as my position (I run EleutherAI) tends to encourage people to be overgenerous with offers. I anticipate having more time this coming month and being on the version that’s submitted for peer review, but we’ll see.

BlinkDL has been working on this project for two-ish years, originally in the EleutherAI discord and then created his own to house the project.

I wasn’t thinking too hard about my exact wording, but yes I was thinking of EleutherAI and its various spin-off servers. EleutherAI doesn’t /run/ any of the other servers, but we all have a close collaborative relationship. I’m sure there’s a lot of duplication of membership (e.g., I’m in all of them) but quickly adding up the membership of each server comes out to around 70,000. EleutherAI and LAION are the largest at 25k each, with the others typically having around 5k each. I would expect at least 30k of those users to be unique though.

The model is created by one person, he does not have enough time to write the paper

It's Type 10 of https://xkcd.com/2456/.

Hahaha. True. And even then it’s an undersell (the limited scope of the paper drops lots of the things being done)

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