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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

> Can these models feasibly be run locally?

Bluntly, no.

The models which are small enough to run locally perform so badly it’s not worth bothering.

To run inference on the large models the perform decently you need the equivalent of two or three top end graphics cards.

If you're serious about looking into it now, consider looking at this project that lets you run a bunch of independent machines as a cluster for inference using Bloom:

https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/petals/wiki/Launch-yo...

(You'll need around 200GB of GPU memory across the machines in the swarm)

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How badly is bad? What sort of output are we talking?

I am asking as I once had a Markov-chain IRC bot* and while it often struggled to string together a sentence, it was quite hilarious sometimes. Absolutely pointless other than the occasional laugh.

Can it form sentences or are those small models completely unusable for anything?

I'm not thinking OpenAI level uses - sort of compare a Postgres cluster to a SQLite file (not literally, conceptually I guess). Can it be used for single tasks in any way?

Could it figure out how to map search terms to URLs for a knowledge base type thing?

Forgive me if these are silly questions. The extent of my knowledge in this field is asking ChatGPT questions and going "that's so cool" when it answers.

* Your phone's predictive text except it finishes the sentence itself based on a word someone in chat used so that it felt on topic.

In my case it also learned how to form sentences from other people talking in chat, in hindsight it's amazing I never had a Tay issue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

> or are those small models completely unusable for anything?

Sadly, they really offer almost no value.

For the effort, you’re better off with an NLP framework like spacy.

You can play with the small neo gpt models on hugging face, eg. https://huggingface.co/EleutherAI/gpt-neo-125M

…but, the tldr is they’re cute to play with, but practically, the content they can generate is short, inconsistent and full of errors.

.... which is actually not of "almost no value." The value of smaller models is different. For example, I have anonymized data, with fields removed. The smaller models do fine for filling those fields in with plausible values.

The smaller models do okay for zero-shot clustering of data in many cases (e.g. liberal versus conservative text), and if not, with minimal training. For generating statistics or probabilistic information about large numbers of text, they're great.

GPT-3, they're not, but I use them in my day-to-day work quite a bit more than I thought I would. I bought a GPU for one purpose, and I find I spin it up a lot these days.

I /really/ want to be able to use a large-scale language model locally, though. For the types of things I'd like it for, such as helping me draft emails, I don't trust OpenAI with my data.

I was recently playing with the GPT-2 and GPT-J models. Results are often non-sensical for any practical purposes, but I think can be used for making something fun - similar to your IRC bot idea.

If you are interested in running these models yourself without having a beefy GPU, you can try my custom inference implementation. It's in pure C/C++ without any 3rd party dependencies, runs straight on the CPU and builds very easily. I think it is relatively well optimised. For example, on a MacBook M1 Pro I can run GPT-2 XL (1.5B params) at 42ms/token and GPT-J / GPT-JT (6B params) at 125ms/token.

Here are a couple of generated examples using GPT-J:

https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml/tree/master/examples/gpt-j

These are examples using zero-shot prompt where the model auto-completes a text given a starting prompt. You can try to make a conversation bot with a few-shot prompt, but it's not great. Probably the model needs some fine-tuning for that to become feasible.

I'll have to have a look into those, there's an audience of about 12 people that would be thrilled to hear "eggbot" is back with a shiny modern brain on, haha.

Oddly enough any processing delay is good in an "AI" chat bot, within reason, makes it feel more natural rather than getting a response ping instantly. Chat version of uncanny valley or something, haha.

Something it also did in Markov form was pick randomly from the longest words in the sentence it had decided to reply to, build the rest of it from that, then run itself "backwards" from the picked word to a sentence starter word it knew.

Thank you for the reply! Looking forward to some tinkering.

FLAN T5 shows promising signs, but it doesn't get even to 50% of GPT-3 performance.

How much of this is the language vs the vast amount of passably accurate domain knowledge? ChatGPT etc. seem magic because they can answer questions about virtually anything with a high degree of plausibility. It often gets specific facts wrong, but the general contours are correct. Many of us know a lot of trivia/specialist knowledge, but I don't think anyone is as broadly informed as ChatGPT appears to be. It's not clear where the language ends and the encyclopedic knowledge starts, but the latter must be taking up a very large amount of the space in the model.

> How much of this is the language vs the vast amount of passably accurate domain knowledge?

LLMs don’t have domain knowledge, its all language.

That's what I meant by 'It's not clear where the language ends and the encyclopedic knowledge starts,' since the model (and perhaps our brains) make little distinction.

But the model seems to be storing an absolutely vast amount of information, beyond the the capability of any individual person to accumulate and recall. This is clearly not a prerequisite for language, even if the information is represented linguistically. Put another way, at age 20 I had read maybe 10-20% of what I've read since, but I was capable of reading comprehension and conversation even though my levels of knowledge and insight were much lower. By 'comprehension' I mean in the sense of being able to read a piece of text and answer questions about it or rewrite it, without necessarily having any priors about the topic; the kind of task we expect to be able to assign to a high school graduate.

I'm wondering what the size of an 'ignorant' language model is, as a precursor to more curated/directed training. While the state of the art is very impressive, it's a bit like taking a feast for a thousand people and rendering it into a giant cube of spam. This strategy seems guaranteed to produce a succession of increasingly capable idiots savant but limits other avenues of exploration.

> at age 20 I had read maybe 10-20% of what I've read since, but I was capable of reading comprehension and conversation...

This is because human intelligence is not just language, but lot of indirect context, "software" inside spinal cord (and other non-cortex parts of brain), and even human body itself.

But as I know, current LLMs working in plain flat structures. At the moment, nobody tried to use even neocortex-like structures, not even considered artificial spinal cord.

All these looks like, to teach table lamp, or something similar smart.

There have been attempts to separate fact knowledge from language knowledge - for example DeepMind RETRO that uses a search index of 1T tokens. RETRO manages to reach GPT-3 performance on some tasks with a 20x smaller model. I believe smaller model are more useful for extractive and classification tasks than creative text generation.

Hmmm, 2-3 high end GPUs implies it's likely not very far off from mainstream. Maybe runnable on the average device within 10-20 years... perhaps even sooner if the model/software can be optimized?

20 years?

In 20 years I'll still be alive and enjoying myself. Does 20 years seem long to you?

it seems a bit long for achieving just running your own AI models locally, given it seems to be largely a question of vram and that you already _could_ do it today with a handful of graphic cards.

20y ago we had the GeForce Ti4400, current graphics cards now come with 100x the vram and 50-60x the bandwidth.

That's one hell of an assumption. Many of my Russian friends were absolutely certain they'll be alive and well for at least the next 20 years not that long ago.

If I'm dead then being able to run an AI locally doesn't matter anyway

Sure, they will be alive if not come to Ukraine.

> 2-3 high end GPUs implies it's likely not very far off from mainstream

Looks like FLOP/s per $ are doubling every ~3 years for high end cards, and 10x in ~10 years. So probably not that far off for desktop users.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c6KFvQcZggQKZzxr9/trends-in-...

FLOPs remain unused when the bottleneck is bandwidth.

I’d be surprised if there weren’t any algo breakthroughs before that to make these several times faster (10x?).

(such as are all of the weights really needed all of the time, or could you load different ones based on recent context?)

If in 10 years on top of that you’d have that 10x faster hardware as well, you might be running GPT-3s as just a subcomponent of games/apps.

ChatGPT prompt: What's the difference between a component and subcomponent?

A component is a self-contained unit of functionality, often in the form of a class or object, that represents a piece of an overall system or application. A subcomponent, on the other hand, is a smaller, simpler component that is used as part of a larger component. A subcomponent is typically used to break down a larger component into smaller, more manageable pieces, and is often used to create reusable building blocks for larger components. In other words, a subcomponent is a component that is used by another component.

Two or three top GPUs? Thats basically nothing for a professinal project or even an investeded hobby

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