Thank you, those insights are invaluable! This is a specific and potentially dumb question and I completely understand if you can't answer it!
The practical motivation for MoEs is very clear but I do worry about loss of compositional abilities (that I think just emerge from superposed representations?) that some tasks may require, especially with the many experts phenomenon we're seeing. This is an observation from smaller MoE models (with like top-k gating etc.) that may or may not scale, that denser models trained to the same loss tend to perform complex tasks "better".
Intuitively, do you think MoEs are just another stopgap trick we're using while we figure out more compute, better optimizers or could there be enough theoretical motivation to justify their continued use? If there isn't, perhaps we need to at least figure out "expert scaling laws" :)
The practical motivation for MoEs is very clear but I do worry about loss of compositional abilities (that I think just emerge from superposed representations?) that some tasks may require, especially with the many experts phenomenon we're seeing. This is an observation from smaller MoE models (with like top-k gating etc.) that may or may not scale, that denser models trained to the same loss tend to perform complex tasks "better".
Intuitively, do you think MoEs are just another stopgap trick we're using while we figure out more compute, better optimizers or could there be enough theoretical motivation to justify their continued use? If there isn't, perhaps we need to at least figure out "expert scaling laws" :)