Radford and Sutskever figured out that they could get rid of that first robot, and instead just have one, the decoder, listen to you and talk back by itself. Early testing showed that the idea worked in practice, which meant they could build a more streamlined language model that was quicker and easier to troubleshoot and grow. And making it “decoder only” would also be a game-changer. By combining a model’s ability to “understand” and speak into one fluid process, it could ultimately generate more humanlike text.
