BitSound , 11 months ago

Here’s a transformer (GPT-4) describing this advancement in transformer architecture:

Sure, let’s break this down like you’re five years old!

Imagine you’re playing with a big set of Lego blocks (think of these as your data). You have a big task: you need to sort all of these blocks based on their colors, size, and shapes (this is similar to processing information in a machine learning model).

At first, you try to do it all by yourself (this is like the original Transformer model). It takes a long time, and your hands get really tired (this means the model takes a lot of time and computer memory).

Then, your older brother comes in with a new plan. He tells you, “Hey, why don’t we divide the work?” He helps you sort the blocks by colors, and you sort them by size and shapes (this is like the ‘work partitioning’ in FlashAttention-2).

Also, your older brother suggests, “Let’s do it together instead of one after another”. So, while he’s sorting by color, you’re sorting by size and shape at the same time (this is the ‘parallelism’ in FlashAttention-2).

This makes the job get done faster and you both don’t get as tired (meaning FlashAttention-2 is faster and uses less memory).

The new way of sorting is also super smart because it knows how to best use your toy boxes to keep your sorted Lego blocks (the ‘IO-aware’ part, with the toy boxes being the different levels of memory in the computer).

FlashAttention-2 is like your older brother’s plan, but for computer models. It helps them process big amounts of data more quickly and efficiently. This is great because it allows us to create even bigger and more exciting models that can understand things like language, pictures, and even generate music and videos.

And just like you needed to have enough space and the right kind of Lego blocks to play this sorting game, to use FlashAttention-2, you need some specific computer parts (like certain types of GPUs), and programming stuff (like CUDA and PyTorch).

This is a big deal because it makes our computer models better and faster. They can learn more and do more cool things, just like how you and your brother can sort more Lego blocks and have more fun with your new sorting plan!