Super cool, though sadly 405b will be outside most personal usage without cloud providers which sorta defeats the purpose of opensource to some extent atleast sadly, because .. nvidia's rampup of consumer VRAM is glacial
I'd think of the 405B model as the equivalent to a big rig tractor trailer. It's not for home use. But also check out the benchmark improvements for the 70B and 8B models.
I agree with you on open source in the original, home tinkerer sense.
This is good enough for a lot of use cases... on a laptop. An expensive laptop, but hardware only gets better and cheaper over time.
(It also predicted that a MacBook Air in 2030 will be able to do the same, and that for smartphones to do the same might take around 20 years.)
A 405B LLM has 405 billion parameters. If you run it at full "prescision", each parameter takes up 2 bytes, which means you need 810GB of memory. If it does not fit in RAM or GPU memory it will swap to disc and be unusably slow.
You can run the model at reduced prescision to save memory, called quantisation, but this will degrade the quality of the response. The exact amount of degradation depends on the task, the specific model and its size. Larger models seem to suffer slightly less. 1 byte per parameter is pretty much as good as full precision. 4 bits per parameter is still good quality, 3 bits is noticeably worse and 2 bits is often bad to unusable.
With 128GB of RAM, zero overhead and a 405B model, you would have to quantize to about 2.5 bits, which would noticeably degrade the response quality.
There is also model pruning, which removes parameters completely, but this is much more experimental than quantisation, also degrades response quality, and I have not seen it used that widely.
The comment about the MPS PyTorch backend was related to performance, not whether the model would fit at all. I can't say whether it's accurate that the MPS backend has significant room for optimization, but it is still publicly listed as in beta.
I would be sceptical about increasing efficiency. I'm not that familiar with the subject, but as far as I know, LLMs for single users (i.e. with batch size 1) are practically always limited by the memory bandwidth. The whole LLM (if it is monolytic) has to be completely loaded from memory once for each new token (which is about 4 characters). With 400GB per second memory bandwidth and 4-bit quantisation, you are limited to 2 tokens per second, no matter how efficiently the software works. This is not unusable, but still quite slow compared to online services.
Maybe we'll get really good LLMs on local hardware when the hype has died down a bit, memory is cheaper and the models are more efficient.
For example here's the list of backends for Llama.cpp: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp?tab=readme-ov-file#su...
Ever priced out a four wheeler, a jet-ski, a filled gun safe, what a "car guy" loses in trade in values every two years, what a hobbyist day-trader is losing before they cut their losses or turn it around, or what a parent who lives vicariously through their child and drags them all over their nearby states for overnight trips so they can do football/soccer/ballet/whatever at 6am on Saturdays against all the other kids who also won't become pro athletes? What about the cost of a wingsuit or getting your pilots license? "Cruisers" or annual-Disney vacationers? If you bought a used CNC machine from a machine shop? But spend five grand on a laptop to play with LLMs and everyone gets real judgmental.
PCIE 5.0 x16 is 500 Gbit/s if I'm not mistaken, so using RAM is more viable an alternative in this case.
Edit: 3090 has 1 TB/s, not terabits
Not in the slightest. They even have a table of cloud providers where you can host the 405B model and the associated cost to do so on their website: https://llama.meta.com/ (Scroll down)
"Open Source" doesn't mean "You can run this on consumer hardware". It just means that it's open source. They also released 8B and 70B models for people to use on consumer gear.
Where could I get a mapping of token / time vs hardware?
The $10k figure is likely roughly the minimum amount of money/hardware that you'd need to run the model at acceptable speeds, as anything less requires you to compromise heavily on GPU cores (e.g. Tesla P40s also have 24GB of VRAM, for half the price or less, but are much slower than 3090s), or run on the CPU entirely, which I don't think will be viable for this model even with gobs of RAM and CPU cores, just due to its sheer size.
I would be curious to see relative failure rates over time of consumer vs Quadro cards as well.
I don't have any actual figures to back this up, but my gut tells me that the fact that enterprise GPUs are an order of magnitude (at least) more expensive than, say a, 3090, means that the payback period of them has got to be pretty long. I also wonder whether setting the max power on a 3090 to a lower than default value (as I suggest in my other post) has a significant effect on the average W/token.
Not necessarily saying that Quadros are cheaper, just that there's more to the calculation when trying to run 405B size models at home
I think it should work as-is with the components listed, but if you disagree please let me know!
I'm not necessarily saying that it's obviously better in terms of total cost, just that there are more factors to consider in a system of this size.
If inference is the only thing that is important to someone building this system, then used 3090s in x8 or even x4 bifurcation is probably the way to go. Things become more complicated if you want to add the ability to train/do other ML stuff, as you will really want to try to hit PCIE 4.0 x16 on every single card.
Will need more space, true.
Here are some TGI 405B benchmarks that I did with the different quantized models:
https://x.com/danieldekok/status/1815814357298577718
The 405B model is very useful outside direct use in inference though. E.g. for generating synthetic data for training smaller model: