829 karma · joined August 31, 2018
A system with say 192GB VRAM and rest standard memory (DGX station, 2xRTX Pro 6000, 4xB60 Dual, etc.) could still in theory run Deepseek @4bit quite quickly because of the power law type usage of the experts.
If you aren't prompting Deepseek in Chinese, a lot of the experts don't activate.
This would be an easier job for pruning, but still I think enthusiast systems are going to trend in a way the next couple years that makes these types of software optimizations useful on a much larger scale.
There's a user on Reddit with a 16x 3090 system (PCIE 3.0 x4 interconnect which doesn't seem to be using full bandwidth during tensor parallelism) that gets 7 token/s in llama.cpp. A single 3090 has enough VRAM bandwidth to scan over its 24GB of memory 39 times per second, so there's something else going on limiting performance.
I've heard decent things about the Windsurf extension in PyCharm, but not being able to use a local LLM is an absolute non-starter for me.
I would be interested to see how feasible hybrid approaches would be, e.g. connect each pair up directly via ConnectX and then connect the sets together via Ethernet.
I personally like the Spline family, and I default to Spline36 for both upscaling and downscaling in ffmpeg. Most people can't tell the difference between Spline36 and Lanczos3. If you want more sharpness, go for Spline64, for less sharpness, try Spline16.
Edit: As far as I'm aware though OpenCV doesn't have Spline as an option for resizing.
Still, 8x3090 gives you ~2.25 bits per weight, which is not a healthy quantization. Doing bifurcation to get up to 16x3090 would be necessary for lightning fast inference with 4bit quants.
At that point though it becomes very hard to build a system due to PCIE lanes, signal integrity, the volume of space you require, the heat generated, and the power requirements.
This is the advantage of moving up to Quadro cards, half the power for 2-4x the VRAM (top end Blackwell Quadro expected to be 96GB).
Now, the first response some folks may have is, how can you trust that the AI is good at security? Well, in this example, it only needs to be better than the junior developers at security to provide them with benefits/learning opportunities. We need to remember that the junior developers of today can also just as easily write insecure code.
For more of the fast VRAM you would be in Quadro territory.
I wonder though, what would be considered a meaningful punishment/reward to an AI agent? More/less training compute? Web search rate limits? That assumes that what the AI "wants" is to increase its own intelligence.
How many GPUs you need is completely dependent on the size of your team, their frequency of usage, and the size of the models you are comfortable with.
I generally recommend you rent instances on something like runpod to build out a good estimate of your actual usage before commiting a bunch of money to hardware.
When splitting models layer by layer, users in r/LocalLLaMA have reported good results with as low as PCIE 3.0 x4 as the interconnect (4GB/s). For tensor parallelism, the interconnect requirements are higher but the upside can be faster speeds in accordance to number of GPUs split across (whereas layer by layer operated like a pipeline, so isn't necessarily faster than what a single GPU can provide, even if splitting across 8 GPUs).
I do think it would be good to include some info. on "what we expect to be common deployment scenarios, and here's some sample VRAM values".
Tangentially, whenever these models get released with fine-tuning scripts (FFT and Lora) I've yet to find a model that provides accurate information on the actual amount of VRAM required to train the model. Often times it's always 8x80GB for FFT, even for a 7B model, but you can tweak the batch sizes and DeepSpeed config. to drop that down to 4x80GB, then with some tricks (8bit Adam, Activation Checkpointing), drop it down to 2x80GB.
As to what an "ethical and not terrible for society" profit margin would be is above my pay grade, but I would estimate 15%. It also probably depends on how easily you can make money on the stock market as well.