We propose a framework for classifying the capabilities and behavior of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) models and their precursors. This framework introduces levels of AGI performance, generality, and autonomy, providing a common language to compare models, assess risks, and measure progress along the path to AGI. To develop our framework, we analyze existing definitions of AGI, and distill six principles that a useful ontology for AGI should satisfy. With these principles in mind, we propose “Levels of AGI” based on depth (performance) and breadth (generality) of capabilities, and reflect on how current systems fit into this ontology. We discuss the challenging requirements for future benchmarks that quantify the behavior and capabilities of AGI models against these levels. Finally, we discuss how these levels of AGI interact with deployment considerations such as autonomy and risk, and emphasize the importance of carefully selecting Human-AI Interaction paradigms for responsible and safe deployment of highly capable AI systems.

Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning, which drastically reduces the number of task-specific training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model (PaLM). We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly efficient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued benefits of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the finetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A significant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies.

Scaling up training datasets and model parameters have benefited neural network-based language models, but also present challenges like distributed compute, input data bottlenecks and reproducibility of results. We introduce two simple and scalable software libraries that simplify these issues: t5x enables training large language models at scale, while seqio enables reproducible input and evaluation pipelines. These open-source libraries have been used to train models with hundreds of billions of parameters on multi-terabyte datasets. Configurations and instructions for T5-like and GPT-like models are also provided. The libraries can be found at https://github.com/google-research/t5x and https://github.com/google/seqio.

Sharan Narang, Hyung Won Chung, Yi Tay, Liam Fedus, Thibault Fevry, Michael Matena, Karishma Malkan, Noah Fiedel, Noam Shazeer, Zhenzhong Lan, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, Nan Ding, Jake Marcus, Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.

Creating and maintaining a platform for reliably producing and deploying machine learning models requires careful orchestration of many components---a learner for generating models based on training data, modules for analyzing and validating both data as well as models, and finally infrastructure for serving models in production. This becomes particularly challenging when data changes over time and fresh models need to be produced continuously. Unfortunately, such orchestration is often done ad hoc using glue code and custom scripts developed by individual teams for specific use cases, leading to duplicated effort and fragile systems with high technical debt.