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by bluecoconut 640 days ago
Some other follow up reflections

1. I wish that Y-axes would switch to be logit instead of linear, to help see power-law scaling on these 0->1 measures. In this case, 20% -> 80% it doesn't really matter, but for other papers (eg. [2] below) it would help see this powerlaw behavior much better.

2. The power law behavior of inference compute seems to be showing up now in multiple ways. Both in ensembles [1,2], as well as in o1 now. If this is purely on decoding self-reflection tokens, this has a "limit" to its scaling in a way, only as long as the context length. I think this implies (and I am betting) that relying more on multiple parallel decodings is more scalable (when you have a better critic / evaluator).

For now, instead of assuming they're doing any ensemble like top-k or self-critic + retries, the single rollout with increasing token size does seem to roughly match all the numbers, so that's my best bet. I hypothesize we'd see a continued improvement (in the same power-law sort of way, fundamentally along with the x-axis of "flop") if we combined these longer CoT responses, with some ensemble strategy for parallel decoding and then some critic/voting/choice. (which has the benefit of increasing flops (which I believe is the inference power-law), while not necessarily increasing latency)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05120 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21787

1 comments

oh, they do talk about it

  On the 2024 AIME exams, GPT-4o only solved on average 12% (1.8/15) of problems. o1 averaged 74% (11.1/15) with a single sample per problem, 83% (12.5/15) with consensus among 64 samples, and 93% (13.9/15) when re-ranking 1000 samples with a learned scoring function. A score of 13.9 places it among the top 500 students nationally and above the cutoff for the USA Mathematical Olympiad.
showing that as they increase the k of ensemble, they can continue to get it higher. All the way up to 93% when using 1000 samples.
I think I'd be curious to know, if the size of ensemble is another scaling dimension for compute, alongside the "thinking time".