prompter: Give me a list of to do items when starting a project to train a large language model that can understanding and respond to human questions

assistant: The following steps are a condensed list of steps to take when starting a project to train a large language model capable of comprehending and responding to human inquiries:

1.  Establish project scope and objectives, target audience.
2.  Gather and preprocess a comprehensive/diverse text dataset.
3.  Select an appropriate model architecture, adjust hyperparameters for accuracy/speed.
4.  Divide dataset into training, validation, testing subsets, implement data augmentation.
5.  Train model, monitor progress on validation set, adjust as needed.
6.  Evaluate model on test set, compare to benchmarks, analyze errors and biases.
7.  Fine-tune for specific tasks or domains through transfer learning or fine-tuning.
8.  Create interface for user input and model response.
9.  Test in controlled environment, gather feedback for improvement.
10.  Continuously monitor and improve performance through retraining and fine-tuning.

This should give you a basic idea of what the required steps are. Should I go into more detail on one of the points?

prompter: These tasks need to be broken down further, could you please provide an updated to-do list with a more detailed breakdown of the tasks ahead

assistant: Here is a more detailed breakdown of each step:

1. Establish project scope and objectives: It is important to clearly define the goals of the project and what the target audience is. This will help you make decisions about what type of data to gather and what model architecture is appropriate.

2. Gather and preprocess data: This is an important step as the quality and diversity of the data will directly impact the performance of the model. Preprocessing may involve cleaning the data, tokenizing text, and converting words to numerical representations.

3. Select model architecture: There are many different types of models to choose from, including recurrent neural networks (RNNs), transformer models, and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The choice will depend on the specific requirements of the project and the amount of data available.

4. Divide dataset and implement data augmentation: Splitting the data into training, validation, and testing subsets is important for monitoring the performance of the model during training. Data augmentation can be used to artificially increase the size of the dataset and improve the robustness of the model.

5. Train model and monitor progress: This step involves training the model on the training data, using the validation set to monitor progress and adjust hyperparameters as needed. It may be necessary to repeat this process several times until the model is performing well on the validation set.

6. Evaluate model on test set: Once the model is trained, it's important to evaluate its performance on a separate test set to get an idea of its generalization ability. This can be done by comparing the model's predictions to the actual outcomes and analyzing the errors.

7. Fine-tune for specific tasks or domains: This step involves further training the model on task-specific data to improve its performance for a particular domain. This can be done through transfer learning, where a pre-trained model is fine-tuned on new data, or through fine-tuning, where the model is trained from scratch on the new data.

8. Create an interface for user input: This involves designing an interface that allows users to input questions or requests, and receive responses from the model.

9. Test in controlled environment: Before deploying the model in a real-world setting, it's important to test it in a controlled environment and gather feedback from users. This will help identify any errors or biases in the model and provide opportunities for improvement.

10. Continuously monitor and improve performance: Finally, it is important to continuously monitor the performance of the model and make updates and improvements as needed. This may involve retraining the model on new data, fine-tuning hyperparameters, or updating the architecture.

assistant: Which steps are you having difficulty understanding?  Training a large language model is a large undertaking that can't be summarized in an actionable list.

assistant: There are various approaches when training a large language model that can understand and respond to questions. The to do list of a simple implementation could be:

1. Download a pre-trained language generation model or train your own. The first option is often the preferred choice, as the community has already trained very good language models, like GPT-J. The second option is more expensive, because training a large language model requires a lot of computational power and resources.
2. Fine-tune the language model on a question-answering dataset, like Stack Overflow. This way, the language model will generate adequate responses to your questions, avoiding to simply continue the initial prompt that you gave it.  


A more involved approach may be to use Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to improve the generated responses, like in the InstructGPT paper. The steps you should follow to implement this model are roughly the following:

1. As before, download a pre-trained language generation model or train your own.
2. Collect demonstration data by generating initial prompts and providing an adequate response to the prompt. In this step, the quality of the responses is of outmost importance as the language model will be fine-tuned on this dataset. It is also possible to incorporate the collected data with other data sets, like Stack Overflow question-answers or some subreddits.
3. Fine-tune the language model on the data collected in the previous point. If you are not sure on how to do it, you can ask me.
4. Rank the responses generated in point 2, a better reply should be ranked higher than a poor one.
5. Train a reward model on the data collected at the previous point, the reward model is trained with supervised learning by predicting the rank of the response.
6. Fine-tune the language model of point 3 with reinforcement learning. The goal is to maximize the reward given by the reward model trained in point 5.

It must be noted that step 2 and 4 can actually be performed simultaneously, like it has been done in the Open-Assistant project from LAION.

I hope this answers your question, ask me if you need anything else!

prompter: Can you make the first approach into a to-do list with hierarchical to do items, where additional smaller ones are parts of the bigger ones?

assistant: Here's a list of to-do items when starting a project to train a large language model:

1. Define the problem statement and objectives of the language model
2. Gather and pre-process a large dataset of text data
3. Select a suitable model architecture and fine-tune it on the dataset
4. Evaluate the model using various metrics (e.g. accuracy, perplexity, F1 score, etc.)
5. Fine-tune and optimize the model based on the evaluation results
6. Implement a user interface or API to interact with the model
7. Test the model on a diverse set of examples and user cases
8. Continuously monitor and improve the model performance over time
9. Ensure the model is trained on ethical and inclusive data, avoiding biases and harmful behaviors.
10. Consider deployment options, such as cloud computing resources or on-premise hardware.

Note: This is a general outline and the specific steps may vary depending on the complexity and specific requirements of the project.

prompter: Can you go more in-depth on step #7?