The 10,000x Yolo Researcher Metagame — with Yi Tay of Reka
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It’s easy to get de-sensitized to new models topping leaderboards every other week — however, the top of the LMsys leaderboard has typically been the exclusive domain of very large, very very well funded model labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. OpenAI had about 600 people at the time of GPT-4, and Google Gemini had 950 co-authors. This is why Reka Core made waves in May - not only debuting at #7 on the leaderboard, but doing so with all-new GPU infrastructure and 20 employees with Shortly after the release of GPT3, [Sam Altman speculated on the qualities of “10,000x researchers”:
* “They spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” In general, no one reflects on this question enough, but the best people do it the most, and have the best ‘problem taste’, which is some combination of learning to think independently, reason about the future, and identify attack vectors.” — sama
* Taste is something both John Schulman and Yi Tay emphasize greatly
* “They have a laser focus on the next step in front of them combined with long-term vision.” — sama
* “They are extremely persistent and willing to work hard… They have a bias towards action and trying things, and they’re clear-eyed and honest about what is working and what isn’t” — sama
“There's a certain level of sacrifice to be an AI researcher, especially if you're training at LLMs, because you cannot really be detached… your jobs could die on a Saturday at 4am, and there are people who will just leave it dead until Monday morning, or there will be people who will crawl out of bed at 4am to restart the job, or check the TensorBoard” – Yi Tay (at 28 mins)
“I think the productivity hack that I have is, I didn't have a boundary between my life and my work for a long time. So I think I just cared a lot about working most of the time. Actually, during my PhD, Google and everything [else], I'll be just working all the time. It's not like the most healthy thing, like ever, but I think that that was actually like one of the biggest, like, productivity, like and I spent, like, I like to spend a lot of time, like, writing code and I just enjoy running experiments, writing code” — Yi Tay (at 90 mins)
* See @YiTayML example for honest alpha on what is/is not working
and so on.
More recently, Yi’s frequent co-author, Jason Wei, wrote about the existence of Yolo researchers he witnessed at OpenAI:
Given the very aggressive timeline — Yi left Google in April 2023, was GPU constrained until December 2023, and then Reka Flash (21B) was released in Feb 2024, and Reka Core (??B) was released in April 2024 — Reka’s 3-5 person pretraining team had no other ch
