DeepSeek Just Fixed One Of The Biggest Problems With AI
Two Minute Papers
0:00 Few people know, but modern AI systems are really silly.
0:04 How?
0:04 Well, imagine having a Michelin-star chef being
0:07 asked for a simple peanut butter sandwich.
0:11 That’s weird, but okay.
0:12 Now, the chef says, you’ll need to wait just a bit,
0:16 because I am going to start planting peanuts,
0:19 wait six months, harvest, churn some peanut butter,
0:22 and then get to work on your bread.
0:25 That sounds really silly,
0:26 and that is exactly what modern AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini do.
0:32 When they need to recall a simple fact,
0:35 like who Alexander the Great was, something crazy happens.
0:39 They go through complex reasoning layers
0:42 and reconstruct everything from scratch every single time.
0:47 That is crazy.
0:48 Now I have an amazing research paper for you here from folks at DeepSeek AI,
0:53 and this is a piece of technology that might underpin most
0:57 if not all of the amazing AI systems of the future.
1:02 Now every now and then we are going to look at a figure, but for the rest,
1:06 I am going to bring my physics simulations
1:08 and all the goodness we talk about around here.
1:12 Apologies for that.
1:13 Okay, so this is a massive waste of compute.
1:16 But why does this happen?
1:18 Well, standard transformers are a kind of neural
1:21 network that is inside nearly all modern AI assistants.
1:25 And here is the problem:
1:27 they lack a simple and cheap way to just look things up.
1:32 Whatever the question is,
1:33 the answer is a huge bunch of dense mathematical calculations.
1:38 From scratch.
1:39 Yes, it is literally planting that peanut when you ask for a sandwich.
1:44 Now in this work, DeepSeek introduces Engram.
1:47 With this, they are giving our tired little chef a pantry.
1:53 Cutting edge technology brother!
1:55 Instead of growing that peanut butter sandwich from scratch,
1:59 it now just grabs the ingredients from the pantry.
2:02 I’ll explain to you how exactly they did it in a bit.
2:06 Now, this makes the AI way more efficient, okay, I expected that.
2:12 But, what?
2:13 Are you seeing what I am seeing?
2:16 Now this I did not expect at all.
2:18 So here comes the surprise.
2:20 Now hold on to your papers Fellow Scholars,
2:23 because when taking away some of the AI's complex reasoning parts,
2:28 known as mixture of experts, MoE.
2:31 Then, replacing it with the pantry actually makes the AI smarter.
2:36 Lower is better here on the loss curves.
2:40 And not just a little, this is significantly smarter.
2:43 Those dots dipping way down show that this hybrid
2:47 chef makes far fewer mistakes than previous techniques.
2:51 It achieves a perfect balance of active
2:54 cooking and just grabbing from the pantry.
2:57 Genius.
2:58 But that is not the only surprising thing in this paper.
3:01 They also added a way for the AI to check the ingredients before using them.
3:07 You don’t want rotting fish in your strawberry jam.
3:10 To ensure this, they created a context-aware gating mechanism.
3:14 The current context is the dish being cooked.
3:18 Now here, this is compared against the retrieved memory,
3:22 the jar from the pantry.
3:24 If the jar's contents don’t agree with the dish,
3:28 the gate drops to zero, throwing the ingredient away.
3:32 Bye bye rotting fish!
3:34 This mechanism lives right here, inside this jolly little dot product.
3:39 Now let’s see how it actually performs against the current systems.
3:44 I’ll tell you exactly what is going to happen now.
3:47 What happens in nearly all research papers with something new.
3:51 It does something, it is compared to previous methods,
3:55 and it’s better at some things, worse at others.
3:59 And then you sit down and you do your analysis.
4:04 Okay, let’s see…wait what?
4:06 What just happened here?
4:08 The new engram technique makes the neural network better…everywhere.
4:13 Absolutely everything is measurably better.
4:16 This is an absolute miracle work.
4:19 The engram model is actually better on every
4:23 single benchmark compared to the previous techniques.
4:26 It is better everywhere!
4:28 Now this is an amazing life lesson too.
4:32 How?
4:32 Well, essentially what DeepSeek does is automates the easy part,
4:37 and focuses on the more difficult tasks.
4:40 No wonder it works so well!
4:42 What a time to be alive!
4:44 We can learn so much from these research papers,
4:48 and not just about AI, but about life itself.
4:52 Okay, now I’ll tell you how this works,
4:54 and it turns out, there are more surprises ahead.
4:58 Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr.
5:01 Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
5:02 Okay, so how does it do this magic?
5:04 Well, it uses what they call n-gram embeddings combined with multi-head hashing.
5:09 Okay, what the heck does that mean?
5:13 Well, in the kitchen, the chef looks at the order ticket, sees a 3-word phrase,
5:19 and instantly knows exactly which shelf in the pantry has the premade sauce,
5:24 and grabs it quickly.
5:26 And I think this also shows us that there are
5:29 simple and basic ideas in AI that we haven’t found yet.
5:33 I mean, this thing is basically a look up table.
5:37 It is as simple as it gets,
5:39 and it makes everything more efficient and better across the board.
5:43 Just think about it:
5:45 we removed 20 or 25% of the smart experts in this little virtual brain,
5:51 put a spreadsheet there, and it got better!
5:55 I mean what?
5:57 Crazy.
5:57 And I love how we have a little better understanding of the AI system itself.
6:03 Usually, no one knows what is going on inside, but here.
6:07 Look.
6:07 When they switched off the engram memory during testing,
6:10 the AI’s ability to answer trivia went down 70%.
6:16 But its reading comprehension remained at 93%.
6:21 Why?
6:21 Well I think this shows that AI split its brain,
6:25 and it’s using the new part just to store facts.
6:29 Just think about it.
6:31 When they locked the pantry door during testing his ability
6:34 to understand a recipe stayed at a massive 93%!
6:38 What does that mean?
6:40 It shows the chef split the work perfectly.
6:44 He used the pantry strictly as a storage shelf for memorized ingredients,
6:48 but he can still cook an amazing meal.
6:52 I think this is going to lead to even cheaper and even smarter AI systems,
6:57 and this will be an important part of why we
7:00 will all get more systems that we can actually own,
7:04 no subscriptions, these run in our pockets super fast, mostly for free.
7:09 Okay, now not even this technique is perfect.
7:12 One limitation is that if you put the engram module too deep in the network,
7:17 it gets less accurate because the model has
7:20 already wasted time processing what is being asked.
7:23 Of course, there is no need to look up what you already computed.
7:27 I think this is common sense at this point.
7:30 Our chef has to check the pantry at the start of the shift.
7:34 If he checks it after the food was served, the pantry is completely useless.
7:40 A really advanced research paper explained in simple words.
7:44 We are Fellow Scholars, and that’s what we do here.
7:48 And we have a growing club.
7:50 I’ll continue in a moment, but you know who is also watching us?
7:54 The one and only Larry Wheels.
7:57 Yes.
7:57 He is one of our OG Fellow Scholars,
8:01 doing some Scholarly work between two hard sets of bicep curls in the gym.
8:06 You think I am kidding?
8:08 I am not.
8:09 Link is in the description.
8:11 Reading his comment made me instantly more muscular.
8:14 So much value.
8:15 Huge respect to Mr.
8:17 Wheels!
8:17 Honored to have you here.
8:20 And here comes the best part.
8:22 I think this will be a part of every major AI system,
8:26 and it is knowledge out there for free for all of us,
8:30 and now you know exactly how it works!
8:33 No nonsense where everything is hidden in a proprietary
8:36 system that costs 300 dollars per month to run.
8:40 Nope.
8:41 All free for all of us.
8:43 Glorious.
8:44 An epic paper.
8:45 Now, as our chef does, I took a bit longer to cook this video.
8:49 But I promise that I did not
8:51 put together my computer from scratch before starting.
8:54 So I took some more time to make sure you get a better video.
8:59 If you feel this is the right way of doing that, subscribe,
9:03 hit the bell and leave a really kind comment.
9:06 And you can also check out Lambda with our link in the description
9:10 because it is an excellent way of running DeepSeek privately, I do it too.