This talk is part of the NLP Seminar Series.

Build an Ecosystem, Not a Monolith

Colin Raffel, University of Toronto
Date: 11:00am - 12:00pm, September 28th 2023
Venue: Room 287, Gates Computer Science Building; Zoom (link hidden)

Abstract

Currently, the preeminent paradigm for building artificial intelligence is the development of large, general-purpose models that aim to be able to perform all tasks at (super)human level. In this talk, I will argue that an ecosystem of specialist models would likely be dramatically more efficient and could be significantly more effective. Such an ecosystem could be built collaboratively by a distributed community and be continually expanded and improved. In this talk, I will outline some of the technical challenges involved in creating model ecosystems, including automatically selecting which models to use for a particular task, merging models to combine their capabilities, and efficiently communicating changes to a model.

Bio

Colin Raffel is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and a faculty researcher at Hugging Face. His work aims to make it easy to get computers to do new things.