Tech News: Google LIMoE – A Step Towards Goal Of A Single AI

Google announced a breakthrough that it calls a step toward achieving the goal of a single AI model that handles multiple tasks.

Sparse models stand out among the most promising approaches for the future of deep learning. Instead of every part of a model processing every input (“dense” modeling), sparse models employing conditional computation learn to route individual inputs to different “experts” in a potentially huge network. This has many benefits. First, model size can increase while keeping computational cost constant — an effective and environmentally friendlier way to scale models, which is often key to high performance. Sparsity also naturally compartmentalizes neural networks. Dense models that learn many different tasks simultaneously (multitask) or sequentially (continual learning) often suffer negative interference, where too much task variety means it is better to just train one model per task, or catastrophic forgetting, where the model becomes worse at earlier tasks as new ones are added. Sparse models help avoid both these phenomena — by not applying the whole model to all inputs, “experts” in the model can specialize on different tasks or data types while still taking advantage of shared parts of the model. Read mode here.