AI: Megatron the Transformer, and its related language models

Alan D. Thompson
September 2021

What’s in my AI? A Comprehensive Analysis of Datasets Used to Train GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-NeoX-20B, Megatron-11B, MT-NLG, and Gopher

Alan D. Thompson
LifeArchitect.ai
March 2022
26 pages incl title page, references, appendix.

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What is Megatron?

Megatron is a large, powerful transformer developed by the Applied Deep Learning Research team at NVIDIA, based on work by Google.

How to use it

Play with the Megatron-11B model at Adam Daniel King’s InferKit.com.

Viz: Megatron MT-NLG (530B, September 2021)

Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG). MT-NLG is the successor to Microsoft Turing NLG 17B and NVIDIA Megatron-LM 8.3B. The MT-NLG model is three times larger than GPT-3 (530B vs 175B).

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Contents: View the data (Google sheets)

Viz: Evolution of Megatron (2019-2021)

* RealNews is practically the same as Common Crawl News (CC-News). RealNews is 120GB from 5,000 domains from Common Crawl Dec/2016-Mar/2019. CC-News is 76GB from Common Crawl Sep/2016-Feb/2019. They are shown with different colours here (amber/blue) for interest only.

Download source (PDF)
Contents: View the data (Google sheets)

Timeline

November 2018: Google open sources BERT. Trained in four days.

July 2019: Facebook AI and University of Washington introduce RoBERTa.

August 2019: NVIDIA introduces Megatron-LM. Trained in 53 minutes.
8.3 billion parameter transformer language model with data parallelism trained on 512 GPUs.

 

April 2020: Facebook AI Research labs introduce Megatron-11b (RoBERTa).
Megatron-11b is a unidirectional language model with 11B parameters based on Megatron-LM. Following the original Megatron work, FAIR trained the model using intra-layer model parallelism with each layer’s parameters split across 8 GPUs.

 
October 2021: NVIDIA and Microsoft introduce Megatron-Turing NLG 530B (The Pile).
Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG). MT-NLG is the successor to Microsoft Turing NLG 17B and NVIDIA Megatron-LM 8.3B. The MT-NLG model is three times larger than GPT-3 (530B vs 175B). Following the original Megatron work, NVIDIA and Microsoft trained the model on over 4,000 GPUs.

“We live in a time where AI advancements are far outpacing Moore’s law. We continue to see more computation power being made available with newer generations of GPUs, interconnected at lightning speeds. At the same time, we continue to see hyperscaling of AI models leading to better performance, with seemingly no end in sight.”
— NVIDIA and Microsoft (October 2021)

 
December 2021: Meta AI introduces Fairseq.
NOTE: Fairseq is not related to Megatron, and the two use different technologies for training. The only link is in the datasets, which is the primary focus of this page. 13B trained in 2,363 GPU-days (assume 1,024 GPUs, for a total of ~3 days).

Alan D. Thompson is a world expert in artificial intelligence, advising everyone from Apple to the US Government on integrated AI. Throughout Mensa International’s history, both Isaac Asimov and Alan held leadership roles, each exploring the frontier between human and artificial minds. His landmark analysis of post-2020 AI—from his widely-cited Models Table to his regular intelligence briefing The Memo—has shaped how governments and Fortune 500s approach artificial intelligence. With popular tools like the Declaration on AI Consciousness, and the ASI checklist, Alan continues to illuminate humanity’s AI evolution. Technical highlights.