Gemstones: A Model Suite for Multi-Faceted Scaling Laws

Scaling laws are typically fit using a family of models with a narrow range of frozen hyperparameter choices. In this work we study scaling laws using multiple architectural shapes and hyperparameter choices, highlighting their impact on resulting prescriptions. As a primary artifact of our research, we release the Gemstones: an open-source scaling law dataset, consisting of over 4000 checkpoints from transformers with up to 2 billion parameters and diverse architectural shapes; including ablations over learning rate and cooldown. Our checkpoints enable more complex studies of scaling, such as analyzing the relationship between width and depth. By examining our model suite, we find that the prescriptions of scaling laws can be highly sensitive to the experimental design process and the specific model checkpoints used during fitting. Code: github.com/mcleish7/gemstone-scaling-laws