Limitations of Monotonic Scaling Functions

Limitation of Test Loss in Predicting Downstream Performance

A research team develops a scaling function that accurately predicts their language model's performance on English text as they increase the model's parameter count. Confident in their findings, they use the same function to budget for a new, larger model intended for generating computer code. However, the final code-generation model performs significantly worse than the function predicted. Which statement best explains this outcome?

Evaluating a Compute Budgeting Strategy

A research lab has developed a scaling function that accurately predicts the performance of their specific 10-billion parameter language model on a large corpus of web text. This function can therefore be considered a reliable predictor for the performance of any other 10-billion parameter language model trained on a different large corpus of web text.