An Intro to Gated Connections in LLMs

Author(s): M

Originally published on Towards AI.

How a simple tweak to a core AI building block is making large language models like GPT-5 smarter, faster, and more efficient.

If you’ve followed the world of AI, you’ve likely heard about the race to build bigger and deeper models. The intuition is simple: more layers of computation mean more power to learn complex patterns, just as a person builds understanding step by step. But for years, this simple idea had a hard limit. When researchers attempted to stack too many layers, for instance, going from 20 to 50, the models wouldn’t just become slightly worse; they would completely fail to learn.

The article discusses the challenges encountered in building deeper AI models, leading to issues like the vanishing gradient problem, which prevented these models from learning effectively. It introduces the concept of residual connections that facilitate the flow of information in deep networks, as well as innovations like gating mechanisms that dynamically manage this flow, leading to smarter and more efficient AI systems. These advancements mark a shift from static to adaptive architecture, allowing models to prioritize relevant information and optimize their learning processes.

Read the full blog for free on Medium.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Published via Towards AI