Early transformers still needed costly labeled corpora for each task. Why did self-supervision make BERT-, Megatron-, and similar variants so effective?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Early transformers still needed a labeled pile for every task. Self-supervision lets BERT- and Megatron-style models pretrain on raw text, then adapt lightly, without ripping out attention. It is not a RAPIDS ingest step and it is not an NCCL ring.
Full Explanation
Self-supervision is the upgrade that creates a training signal from raw text so a transformer can pretrain at scale and then adapt lightly. It does not replace attention and it is not RAPIDS or NCCL.