tl;dr: Take 5 minutes to skim https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/. It could be one of the most impactful things you do this year. Black Friday encourages us to buy things in person. Cyber Monday encourages us to buy things on the internet. In response to this focus on consumerism, Giving Tuesday was born…

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias…

It’s tough to understand all the numbers on COVID developments. I made a Colab notebook to try to answer the question “are things getting better or worse?”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me this before??” This is my feeling about most of the content in this list when I first encountered it. I’ve aggregated it here roughly in order of impact. 1. Become a rationalist and effective altruist mindingourway.com → Effective Altruism HPMOR Attend a CFAR retreat or read the manual The Life You Can…

On Halloween, I started taking Lexapro, an SSRI, to treat my depression. On the first day, I noticed an obvious and immediate effect as soon as it kicked in. I felt like someone had flipped a light switch in my mind. I felt good in a way that I have…

Reading about how Leonardo da Vinci journaled so prolifically but only published a tiny fraction made me feel both sad and inspired. I was sad that his incredible observations and discoveries lay dormant in his private collection. For example, he was the first person to document all the kinds of…

500MB of Pytorch on AppEngine and Kubernetes — I recently deployed a 500MB Pytorch model. It was surprisingly hard! In this post, I document the pitfalls and tradeoffs I made. Running on CPU was nearly as fast as GPU for non-batch processing, so I recommend starting with that if you can. Easy ways fail Tensorflow Serving seemed ok, but converting our…

An exploration of standard sampling techniques and the new nucleus sampling — Causal language models like GPT-2 are trained to predict the probability of the next word given some context. For example, given “I ate a delicious hot ___”, the model may predict “dog” with 80% probability, “pancake” 5% probability…

Ben Mann, Yaroslav Bulatov, Darius Lam TL;DR: we made Transformer-XL train efficiently on 128 GPUs on AWS. The code is available at https://github.com/cybertronai/transformer-xl Overview One of the difficulties of researching language models is that you often don’t know if your ideas work until you try them on a real-world datasets. However…