We present the next evolution in natural language processing – the Modular Reasoning, Knowledge and Language (MRKL, pronounced “miracle”) system – and Jurassic-X, AI21 Labs’ implementation of it. MRKL systems include one or more language models, and augment them with external knowledge sources as well as symbolic reasoning experts that can handle tasks that lie beyond the reach of neural models.
We present the next evolution in natural language processing – the Modular Reasoning, Knowledge and Language (MRKL, pronounced “miracle”) system – and Jurassic-X, AI21 Labs’ implementation of it. MRKL systems include one or more language models, and augment them with external knowledge sources as well as symbolic reasoning experts that can handle tasks that lie beyond the reach of neural models.
In August 2021 we released Jurassic-1, a 178B-parameter autoregressive language model. We’re thankful for the reception it got – over 10,000 developers signed up, and hundreds of commercial applications are in various stages of development. Mega models such as Jurassic-1, GPT-3 and others are indeed amazing, and open up exciting opportunities. But these models are also inherently limited. They can’t access your company database, don’t have access to current information (for example, latest COVID numbers or dollar-euro exchange rate), can’t reason (for example, their arithmetic capabilities don’t come close to that of an HP calculator from the 1970s), and are prohibitively expensive to update. A MRKL system such as Jurassic-X enjoys all the advantages of mega language models, with none of these disadvantages. Here’s how it works.
Compositive multi-expert problem: the list of “Green energy companies” is routed to Wiki API, “last month” dates are extracted from the calendar and “share prices” from the database. The “largest increase“ is computed by the calculator and finally, the answer is formatted by the language model.
There are of course many details and challenges in making all this work - training the discrete experts, smoothing the interface between them and the neural network, routing among the different modules, and more. To get a deeper sense for MRKL systems, how they fit in the technology landscape, and some of the technical challenges in implementing them, see our MRKL paper. For a deeper technical look at how to handle one of the implementation challenges, namely avoiding model explosion, see our paper on leveraging frozen mega LMs.
Even without diving into technical details, it’s easy to get a sense for the advantages of Jurassic-X. Here are some of the capabilities it offers, and how these can be used for practical applications.
Language models are closed boxes which you can use, but not change. However, in many practical cases you would want to use the power of a language model to analyze information you possess - the supplies in your store, your company’s payroll, the grades in your school and more. Jurassic-X can connect to your databases so that you can ‘talk’ to your data to explore what you need- “Find the cheapest Shampoo that has a rosy smell”, “Which computing stock increased the most in the last week?” and more. Furthermore, our system also enables joining several databases, and has the ability to update your database using free language (see figure below).
Language models can generate text, yet can not be used to create text on current affairs, because their vast knowledge (historic dates, world leaders and more) represents the world as it was when they were trained. This is clearly (and somewhat embarrassingly) demonstrated when three of the world’s leading language models (including our own Jurassic-1) still claim Donald Trump is the US president more than a year after Joe Biden was sworn into office.
Jurassic-X solves this problem by simply plugging into resources such as Wikidata, providing it with continuous access to up-to-date knowledge. This opens up a new avenue for AI-assisted text generation on current affairs.
Jurassic-X can assist in text generation on up-to-date events by combining a powerful language model with access to Wikidata
A 6 year old child learns math from rules, not only by memorizing examples. In contrast, language models are designed to learn from examples, and consequently are able to solve very basic math like 1-, 2-, and possibly 3- digit addition, but struggle with anything more complex. With increased training time, better data and larger models, the performance will improve, but will not reach the robustness of an HP calculator from the 1970s. Jurassic-X takes a different approach and calls upon a calculator whenever a math problem is identified by the router. The problem can be phrased in natural language and is converted by the language model to the format required by the calculator (numbers and math operations). The computation is performed and the answer is converted back into free language.
Importantly (see example below) the process is made transparent to the user by revealing the computation performed, thus increasing the trust in the system. In contrast, language models provide answers which might seem reasonable, but are wrong, making them impractical to use.
Jurassic-X can answer non-trivial math operations which are phrased in natural language, made possible by the combination of a language model and a calculator
Solving simple questions might require multiple steps, for example - “Do more people live in Tel Aviv or in Berlin?” requires answering: i. What is the population of Tel-Aviv? ii. What is the population of Berlin? iii. Which is larger? This is a highly non-trivial process for a language model, and language models fail to answer this question (see example). Moreover, the user can’t know the process leading to the answers, hence is unable to trust them. Jurassic-X can decompose such problems into the basic questions, route each to the relevant expert, and put together an answer in free language. Importantly, Jurassic-X not only provides the correct answer but also displays the steps taken to reach it, increasing the trust in the system.
Jurassic-X breaks down compositional questions, answers the basic sub-questions, and puts together the answer. Importantly, this process is transparent to the user greatly increasing the trust in the system
Certain types of information change continuously - weather, currency exchange rates, share values and more. Such information will never be captured by language models, yet can easily be handled by Jurassic-X by integrating it with a reliable source of information. We performed a proof-of-concept on two such features - weather and currency exchange rates, and the design enables quick integration with more sources to solve your use-case.
Weather - a loosely phrased question about the weather elicits an answer from all language models, where language models always return the same answer, regardless of when the question was asked (funny, right?), while Jurassic-X provides an answer based on the actual weather prediction.
Jurassic-X combines a language model with access to APIs with continuously changing information. This is demonstrated for weather forecasts and currency exchange rates, and can easily be extended to other information sources
Transparency is a critical element that is lacking in language models, preventing a much wider adoption of these models. This lack of transparency is demonstrated by the answers to the question - “Was Clinton ever elected as president of the United States?”. The answer, of course, depends on which Clinton you have in mind, which is only made clear by Jurassic-X that has a component for disambiguation. More examples of Jurassic-X’s transparency were demonstrated above - displaying the math operation performed to the user, and the answer to the simple sub-questions in the multi-step setting.
Jurassic-X is designed to be more transparent by displaying which expert answered which part of the question, and by presenting the intermediate steps taken and not just the black-box response
That's it, you get the picture. The use cases above give you a sense for some things you could do with Jurassic-X, but now it's your turn. A MRKL system such as Jurassic-X is as flexible as your imagination. What do you want to accomplish? Contact us for early access
