UL2 vs ChatGPT Plugins

The research paper titled "UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms" focuses on creating a comprehensive framework for pre-training language models that excel across various datasets and setups, confronting the challenge that existing pre-trained models are often specialized for specific types of problems. The authors, Yi Tay, and team, have disentangled architectural archetypes from pre-training objectives to present a broadened self-supervision perspective within NLP. A novel pre-training objective named Mixture-of-Denoisers (MoD) is introduced, blending different pre-training approaches. Additionally, the paper explores mode switching, which ties downstream fine-tuning to definite pre-training methods.

Through rigorous experimentation, the authors demonstrate that their method, especially when scaled up to 20B parameters, gains state-of-the-art (SOTA) accolades on 50 known NLP tasks and showcases impressive in-context learning capabilities, outshining models like GPT-3 and T5 in various benchmarks. The team has publicly released Flax-based T5X checkpoints for their UL2 20B & Flan-UL2 20B models, a significant contribution for NLP research and application.

OpenAI follows an iterative deployment philosophy, and as part of this approach, it is gradually releasing plugins for ChatGPT. The purpose of this gradual release is to study the real-world use of the plugins, assess their impact, and identify any safety and alignment challenges that may arise. Getting these aspects right is essential for OpenAI to achieve its mission.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, users have expressed interest in having access to plugins, and many developers are experimenting with similar ideas. OpenAI is initially rolling out plugins to a small set of users and plans to gradually increase access as it learns more. After an alpha period, API users who want to integrate plugins into their products will also have access. OpenAI is excited to build a community that will help shape the future of the human-AI interaction paradigm.

Developers who have been invited off the waitlist can use OpenAI's documentation to build a plugin for ChatGPT. Once the plugin is created, it is listed in the prompt shown to the language model, along with documentation that instructs the model on how to use each one. The first set of plugins has been created by Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier.