The important moves in artificial intelligence.

How AI training scales

We’ve discovered that the gradient noise scale, a simple statistical metric, predicts the parallelizability of neural network training on a wide range of tasks. Since complex tasks tend to have noisier gradients, increasingly large batch sizes are likely to become useful in the future, removing one potential limit to further growth of AI systems. More broadly, these results show that neural network training need not be considered a mysterious art, but can be rigorized and systematized.

AI and compute

We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.4-month doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had a 2-year doubling period)[^footnote-correction]. Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (a 2-year doubling period would yield only a 7x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities.

Scaling Kubernetes to 2,500 nodes

Block-sparse GPU kernels

We’re releasing highly-optimized GPU kernels for an underexplored class of neural network architectures: networks with block-sparse weights. Depending on the chosen sparsity, these kernels can run orders of magnitude faster than cuBLAS or cuSPARSE. We’ve used them to attain state-of-the-art results in text sentiment analysis and generative modeling of text and images.

Extensions and limitations of the neural GPU

Semi-supervised knowledge transfer for deep learning from private training data

Adversarial training methods for semi-supervised text classification

Weight normalization: A simple reparameterization to accelerate training of deep neural networks