Just one year after its launch, ChatGPT had more than 100M weekly users. In order to meet this explosive demand, the team at OpenAI had to overcome several scaling challenges. An exclusive deepdive.
Thank you for the deep dive. Content like this inspires me to revisit the computer engineering basics and to not forget the importance of understanding the hardware platform. It's easy to lose sight of it when spending all the time up the stack, only worrying about shipping features.
The point of "Some scaling challenges can be reduced to solving a math problem" reminds me of how Meta optimized their serverless platform XFaaS. Pretty cool to see less common/talked about efficiency habits come up recently when it comes to scaling platforms.
I think "If you want the model to predict the 1,000th token, it needs to do about 1 million operations" is wrong. Generating the 1,000th token requires 1,000 operations. However, generating all 1,000 tokens leading to it is what's quadratic. So it should be "If you want the model to predict *1,000 tokens*, it needs to do about 1 million operations"
Excellent report. Seems this is a balancing act to optimize the hardware usage. Thinking Blockchain and Crypto pushed the envelope, forcing NVidia to grow, and that opened the door for ChatGPT, perhaps.
But I really wonder about 'trash in, trash out'. While the internals of how it is done is wonderful to contemplate, what about what is flowing through the ChatGPT pipes?
Having tracked data scientists graphing how Twitter and other social media platforms have been manipulated by people who have an interest in flooding the field with alternative truths, it seems a given this will happen. What mechanisms are in there to check for this type of manipulation and block it?
Russia and North Korean troll factories, run by their governments, have had a nice long rehearsal run with social media and YouTube and continue to do a lot of damage. Or think about companies trying to wriggle out of a royally deserved bad reputation. Isn't it reasonable to expect the Internet will be flooded with even more misinformation as bad actors try and overwhelm ChatGPT with 'dirty data' and misdirect people?
Feels like we are throwing an amazing and very persuasive technology (it speaks our language!) out there without immune systems. Our enemies will distribute measles infected blankets to us, and we'll have zero defense. Are there any alarm systems planned at all to at least alert us to attacks?
Thank you for the deep dive. Content like this inspires me to revisit the computer engineering basics and to not forget the importance of understanding the hardware platform. It's easy to lose sight of it when spending all the time up the stack, only worrying about shipping features.
The point of "Some scaling challenges can be reduced to solving a math problem" reminds me of how Meta optimized their serverless platform XFaaS. Pretty cool to see less common/talked about efficiency habits come up recently when it comes to scaling platforms.
Fantastic article. Perfect balance of breadth and depth IMO.
A good piece. Why OpenAI Triton is not mentioned here ?
I think "If you want the model to predict the 1,000th token, it needs to do about 1 million operations" is wrong. Generating the 1,000th token requires 1,000 operations. However, generating all 1,000 tokens leading to it is what's quadratic. So it should be "If you want the model to predict *1,000 tokens*, it needs to do about 1 million operations"
Excellent report. Seems this is a balancing act to optimize the hardware usage. Thinking Blockchain and Crypto pushed the envelope, forcing NVidia to grow, and that opened the door for ChatGPT, perhaps.
But I really wonder about 'trash in, trash out'. While the internals of how it is done is wonderful to contemplate, what about what is flowing through the ChatGPT pipes?
Having tracked data scientists graphing how Twitter and other social media platforms have been manipulated by people who have an interest in flooding the field with alternative truths, it seems a given this will happen. What mechanisms are in there to check for this type of manipulation and block it?
Russia and North Korean troll factories, run by their governments, have had a nice long rehearsal run with social media and YouTube and continue to do a lot of damage. Or think about companies trying to wriggle out of a royally deserved bad reputation. Isn't it reasonable to expect the Internet will be flooded with even more misinformation as bad actors try and overwhelm ChatGPT with 'dirty data' and misdirect people?
Feels like we are throwing an amazing and very persuasive technology (it speaks our language!) out there without immune systems. Our enemies will distribute measles infected blankets to us, and we'll have zero defense. Are there any alarm systems planned at all to at least alert us to attacks?