TLDR AI · MISCELLANEOUS
OPENAI ASTRA AND LOOPED TRANSFORMERS
Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter
OpenAI's model is a looped transformer, which means it reuses layers in the transformer block to increase capacity without adding parameters. This can significantly increase the size of the model without increasing the amount of storage and RAM needed to host it. However, it also increases the costs of running the model as embedded text has to run through more layers. The looped transformer aspect is just a small architectural tweak and is not the reason why Astra is a really good model.