Opinion
BLOOM Is the Most Important AI Model of the Decade
Not DALL·E 2, not PaLM, not AlphaZero, not even GPT-3.
You may be wondering if such a bold headline is true. The answer is yes. Let me explain why.
GPT-3 came out in 2020 and established a new road the whole AI industry has been following in intention and attention since. Tech companies have repeatedly built better, larger models, one after another. But although they’ve put millions into the task, none of them has fundamentally changed the leading paradigm or the game’s rules GPT-3 laid out two years ago.
Gopher, Chinchilla, and PaLM (arguably the current podium of large language models) are significantly better than GPT-3 but they are, in essence, more of the same thing. Chinchilla has proved the success of slightly different scaling laws, but it’s still a large transformer-based model that uses a lot of data and compute, like the others.
DALL·E 2, Imagen, and Parti, although distinct in what they do — text-to-image models that add techniques beyond the transformers — they’re pretty much based on the same trends. Even Flamingo and Gato, which depart slightly from GPT-3 towards a more generalistic, multimodal approach to AI, are just a remix of the same ideas applied to novel tasks.