The real benefit of a large language model lies in its robust few-shot learning capability. While capability refers to its ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant text, the few-shot learning ability is crucial as it allows the model to adapt quickly and efficiently to new challenges, even with limited labeled training data. This enhances the versatility and adaptability of the model, particularly in scenarios where addressing new languages or domains is required.
It seems like you're questioning the relative benefits of large language models and few-shot learning.
Let's break it down:
Large Language Models: A large language model like GPT-4 has numerous benefits. It's able to understand and generate complex responses in human language, which can be used for a variety of applications such as answering questions, writing essays, tutoring, translating languages, and more. Its large capacity allows it to generalize across a wide range of tasks and generate novel responses. It can also provide a reasonable response to many types of input because of its broad training on a wide variety of data.
Few-Shot Learning: Few-shot learning is an ability that large language models have, which is their ability to adapt to new tasks with very little new data. This is in contrast to traditional machine learning models that often require a lot of labeled data to learn a new task. This ability makes large language models quite flexible because they can handle tasks they weren't explicitly trained for, as long as those tasks are similar enough to what they've seen during training.
So, to your question: it's not so much that the capacity of a large language model is inherently better than its few-shot learning ability. Instead, these are two different aspects that both contribute to the effectiveness of large language models. The large capacity allows the model to have a broad understanding and generate high-quality responses, while the few-shot learning ability allows it to flexibly adapt to new tasks. Both are important components of what makes large language models powerful and useful.
The real gain of large language models is their big capability. They can perform a wide range of tasks such as text generation, summarization, translation, and question answering. Few-shot learning is one of the benefits of large language models but not the only one. Large language models can learn from a few examples and generalize to new tasks and domains.