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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Gemini 1.0, published by Zvi on December 7, 2023 on LessWrong.
It's happening. Here is CEO Pichai's Twitter announcement. Here is Demis Hassabis announcing. Here is the DeepMind Twitter announcement. Here is the blog announcement. Here is Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals, promising more to come. Here is Google's Chief Scientist Jeff Dean bringing his best hype.
EDIT: This post has been updated for the fact that I did not fully appreciate how fake Google's video demonstration was.
Technical Specifications
Let's check out the specs.
Context length trained was 32k tokens, they report 98% accuracy on information retrieval for Ultra across the full context length. So a bit low, both lower than GPT - 4 and Claude and lower than their methods can handle. Presumably we should expect that context length to grow rapidly with future versions.
There are three versions of Gemini 1.0.
Gemini 1.0, our first version, comes in three sizes: Ultra for highly-complex tasks, Pro for enhanced performance and deployability at scale, and Nano for on-device applications. Each size is specifically tailored to address different computational limitations and application requirements.
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Nano: Our most efficient model, designed to run on-device. We trained two versions of Nano, with 1.8B (Nano-1) and 3.25B (Nano-2) parameters, targeting low and high memory devices respectively. It is trained by distilling from larger Gemini models. It is 4-bit quantized for deployment and provides best-in-class performance.
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The Nano series of models leverage additional advancements in distillation and training algorithms to produce the best-in-class small language models for a wide variety of tasks, such as summarization and reading comprehension, which power our next generation on-device experiences.
This makes sense. I do think there are, mostly, exactly these three types of tasks. Nano tasks are completely different from non-Nano tasks.
This graph reports relative performance of different size models. We know the sizes of Nano 1 and Nano 2, so this is a massive hint given how scaling laws work for the size of Pro and Ultra.
Gemini is natively multimodal, which they represent as being able to seamlessly integrate various inputs and outputs.
They say their benchmarking on text beats the existing state of the art.
Our most capable model, Gemini Ultra, achieves new state-of-the-art results in 30 of 32 benchmarks we report on, including 10 of 12 popular text and reasoning benchmarks, 9 of 9 image understanding benchmarks, 6 of 6 video understanding benchmarks, and 5 of 5 speech recognition and speech translation benchmarks.
Gemini Ultra is the first model to achieve human-expert performance on MMLU (Hendrycks et al., 2021a) - a prominent benchmark testing knowledge and reasoning via a suite of exams - with a score above 90%. Beyond text, Gemini Ultra makes notable advances on challenging multimodal reasoning tasks.
I love that 'above 90%' turns out to be exactly 90.04%, whereas human expert is 89.8%, prior SOTA was 86.4%. Chef's kiss, 10/10, no notes. I mean, what a coincidence, that is not suspicious at all and no one was benchmark gaming that, no way.
We find Gemini Ultra achieves highest accuracy when used in combination with a chain-of-thought prompting approach (Wei et al., 2022) that accounts for model uncertainty. The model produces a chain of thought with k samples, for example 8 or 32. If there is a consensus above a preset threshold (selected based on the validation split), it selects this answer, otherwise it reverts to a greedy sample based on maximum likelihood choice without chain of thought.
I wonder when such approaches will be natively integrated into the UI for such models. Ideally, I should be able to, after presumably giving them my credit card information, turn my (Bard?) to 'Gemini k-sample Chai...
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