One thing in AI research that I have finally recognized with clarity is the idea of “inertia bias”: continuing to do something when it’s not the best option.
The most basic instance of inertia bias is the feeling of “I already spent time implementing X, so let me continue trying to make it work, even though something better came up”. I find that this happens to me rather frequently—an idea that I spend a few days on is rendered obsolete for some reason (e.g., stronger experimental setting, ingenuity from a collaborator, etc). In these cases I usually just document what I did, reflect on how I could have done better, and move on.
In the medium term, at OpenAI I once spent three months on a project, only to find that another team had implemented a surprisingly better solution. It didn’t feel great to abandon my work and not deploy anything. But I recognized that I needed to not waste more time, so I decided to start something new (and luckily my project had other positive outcomes, e.g., I learned a lot).
When I first started in AI, I was clouded by inertia bias for almost a year. In 2019, I wrote a successful paper in text data augmentation. At the time I had an academic mindset of creating a cohesive body of work, and so I tried to milk my success. I wrote four more data augmentation papers, all of which were accepted to top conferences. But the impact turned out to be nothing but a few dozen citations to pad my CV.
The defining bet of my career so far was on the power of scaling language models, which I made in 2021. Obviously this is the current paradigm, and large language models have been hugely impactful. But this won’t be the last paradigm in AI. So when the time comes, I hope I will have the wisdom to fight this inertia and pivot to the next big thing.
(Knowing when to pivot after finding success is tricky, and I really admire those that successfully do it. A few years back I had the pleasure of visiting Luke Zettlemoyer’s lab at the University of Washington. Luke had done seminal work in the early 2010s on semantic parsing, and again in the late 2010s on language pre-training. When I asked his students what made him so successful, the most common answer I heard was that he doesn’t try to milk his successes, but rather he adapts quickly to the front of the field and tries to innovate.)
As a kid I loved whiteboard lectures way more than slides, so for Stanford’s CS25 class I gave a whiteboard lecture!
My goal was to simply and clearly explain why language models work so well, purely via intuitions.
Youtube video: https://t.co/rgeh6TtfrN (w/ @hwchung27)