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So, first of all it does work and you can see the sample from the whole training run here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/volotat/mini-AGI/refs/head...
Here is the scaling law graph I have so far, and it looks very promising: https://github.com/volotat/mini-AGI/blob/main/assets/scaling...
The model was built under my deep dissatisfaction so we cannot really train even moderately big models (1B+ scale) on the consumer's hardware. We can inference and fine-tune them for sure, but I would like to have full control over what the model sees over the training run, so it is fully aligned with my interests, not some corporations.
I was thinking about for some time and come up with two interesting ideas I thought worth pursuing: MoE with a lot of experts that gets added and pruned from the model while it trains, where only a small subset of of experts are actually in use at any particular moment + batch 1 training on the single continuous stream of data.
First allows us to be bounded only by the disk space in terms of number of parameters and load and unload experts only when they are needed. The second (if figured out and it turns out to be doable) allows us to get aways with small VRAM capacity because we do not need to store big randomized batches and their respective gradients.
I started brainstorming with Claude and after some time we found an approach that seems to be promising, and low and behold, a few weeks pass and you can see the results yourself.
Obviously, I did use AI in the process of making this project and I am pretty sure it would be completely impossible for me to do something like this without it, so I hope it is more than justified.
The model is still running over the first of 7.8B characters corpus I selected for training, so the weights are not out yet, and it's about a couple weeks of waiting until they are cooked at the current reading speed. And yeah, the model just read continuous interleaved passages from the dataset, each by 32K characters long each as a single stream. Just as you or I would do.
The set up seems to be really simple so you can git clone the project, run it and observe everything for yourself.
Thanks for your attention.
Seeing 'Mini-AGI' and '8GB VRAM' in the same sentence is a breath of fresh air. Maybe local AGI isn't so far-fetched.
Nobody will throw rocks, I think most people are curious/suspicious about the big players and wants more hands-on since we suspect that this all will come down in cost soon enough.
Getting conceptually closer to how the human brain works. Looking forward to more of this.
I also like how it is very organic. It naturally grows and deletes unused elements, so in addition to traditional backprop there is also a natural selection happening in the background. Each new expert has 16 parents by the way, lol.
Seems interesting, I've been messing with a lot of continuous learning approaches lately and it's cool to see something that's built from the ground up for avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Worth a clone for sure
throwing crumpled paper ball
Is this architecture actually able to generalize or is it mostly based on memorization? Have you tried some basic tasks that require generalization? e.g. number addition etc?
The model is way too small and undertrained to make any generalization claims. I want to wait until it reads the whole corpus I gave and then test it on some simple established benchmarks to see how it will behave.
What kind of hardware are you using for training?
nm, I found it:
Super impressive.
THANK YOU SO MUCH. This is the missing piece.
Have you tested what it remembers from early in the stream after a shift in the topics thrown at it?
It interleaves random streams of 32K characters long each when reading the whole corpus, but each such stream reads continuously as you would expect. This is a necessary step to prevent just normal, not catastrophic, forgetting. I have not tested it in any other regimes yet with bigger or smaller windows. You can imagine a person that changes the activity from time to time, so I think it is justified. So there is not really "early in the stream".
What I did test though is reading 524K characters of chess data only and see how other domains have degraded. The results are in the readme under "How continual learning works" section. Spoiler: it just barely degraded the performance.