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fgfm

718 karma · joined April 12, 2023

Tech cofounder by day, Open Source contributor by night

Twitter @FrG_FM

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fgfm··on The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing
It's funny how discoveries in NLP & computer vision complement each other. The replacement of multiplication by additions made me think about the AdderNet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13200), which concluded as you had to suffer almost no performance drop.

Perhaps the accumulators in current hardware cannot leverage this to its full potential, but combined with such a strict quantization, this would open LLM to the wider ML community much earlier than expected (when consumer hardware allows you to train near SOTA LLMs from scratch on your machine).

fgfm··on Show HN: Quack Companion – VSCode extension for OSS contribution assistance
That last part feels very relatable to me: I've seen organizations who are mindful of the licenses of tools they use to avoid further problems, and others assuming that because it's closed source the problem won't ever arise.

License-wise, we're getting more and more transparency on the permissions that apply to the training sets of each OSS model. But I would argue that once we're passed that, developers are gonna raise their expectations:

- control over dependency multiplicity ~= "rewrite this using only a single linear algebra library with Apache 2 license" or even "rewrite this in pure Node JS"

- adding corresponding reference/license notice: the model copies/adapts a section of a library that requires copyright notice reproduction.

- transparency on the similarity with the source material if it was copied/adapted from somewhere else (even if the license allows this, this enters the realm of social courtesy/community codes)

fgfm··on Show HN: Quack Companion – VSCode extension for OSS contribution assistance
Haha I don't know what your poison is, but the same goes for: - using the syntax of Python 3.11 for asynchronous tasks; - using Promises vs. Observables in Javascript

Was the demo example confusing, or not challenging enough perhaps? If you have tough coding guidelines you've been enforcing manually in code reviews up until now, please do share

fgfm··on Show HN: Quack Companion – VSCode extension for OSS contribution assistance
Thanks for sharing, that's an interesting social component of the equation. From your comment, I assume you're referring to something I've also encountered as a maintainer: we filter out signals where no efforts were put in. If I get the feeling that a PR is perhaps a bit useful but that the author has committed an LLM-generated piece of code, I'll be on the fence. If I'm asked to review a PR with the bare minimal added value, but the author has tried their best and is seeking help to get them started with OSS contributions, I will help. Was that your experience as well?

In that regard, the proxy for "no effort" usually defaults to "it looks like the PR doesn't check any of the guidelines in the CONTRIBUTING.md or the PR template". Here we're trying to always bring that guideline context, make it requestable, and inject it into your coding workflow. In the process, we want to educate those developers about your specific engineering culture.

Besides, code generation is inevitably going to become a growing part of software engineering. Here we're making sure this transition isn't operated without proper alignment or context. It's already challenging to get everyone on the same page in code reviews, so team alignment isn't a trivial problem and it's not gonna improve with the extra thousands of LoC developers will be able to produce each day. Or do you foresee a significant proportion of OSS maintainers consistently rejecting automatically-generated code?

fgfm··on Show HN: Quack Companion – VSCode extension for OSS contribution assistance
We'll do our best to consistently report it since this can indeed influence the financial decisions of developers, especially if they go through third-party paying LLM APIs. In our early experiments, we've seen about 200-250 tokens per request (~= autocompletion), of which about 40-50 tokens are generated.

Two things we're doing this:

- right now our API response contains more than what's required for autocompletion, so there is room for improvement there. And since we focus on team alignment, the goal is to boost the suggestion acceptance rate compared to alternatives. So in the end, fewer calls and lower token consumption.

- since we're working on fully migrating to hostable OSS models of reasonable size, the financial aspect of token consumption should be mostly moved out of the picture to focus on latency.

fgfm··on Show HN: Quack Companion – VSCode extension for OSS contribution assistance
I appreciate the feedback about clarity, thanks! We'll update the documentation and agree to reflect that more accurately.

For now, we've started with VSCode as an IDE and used GitHub for authentication. But actually, we're already working with GitLab to add support. For other VCS, the prioritization will be demand-based as we don't want to spread thin early on.

Regarding the OpenAI part, as stated in the post, we're currently migrating the community version to self-hosted OSS models. If you sniff around the backend API repo, you'll see there is already a third-party service registered for Ollama and a corresponding docker-compose (https://github.com/quack-ai/contribution-api/blob/main/docke...). Our next release was already planned to switch to Ollama (keeping OpenAI as an alternative as well), so I'm thrilled if that goes along with the community preference!

fgfm··on Exponentially faster language modelling
This approach feels like pruning, but the speedup is considerably higher. Interestingly, I'm curious how this will play out on more recent transformer architectures though: I guess the speedup will be more important for the largest architectures, but even if we can get 2x or 10x speedup on Mistral/Zephyr, Orca 2 or OpenChat3.5, that would be a tremendous achievement!
fgfm··on Orca 2: Teaching Small Language Models How to Reason
Orca 2-13B consistently beat Llama 2-70B on most benchmarks in 0-shot. Hopefully, research papers will start to include Mistral/Zephyr 7B & Openchat 3.5. Even though they're smaller, they're getting competitive against much larger models and they're much cheaper to orchestrate.
fgfm··on OpenChat 3.5: 7B model with comparable perf to ChatGPT
The Alignement AI Lab just published OpenChat 3.5, which is outperforming ChatGPT (march version) on most benchmarks apart from MMLU (67.3% vs 64.3%) & BBH-CoT (70.1% vs 63.5%).
fgfm··on Loading Llama-2 70B 20x faster with Anyscale Endpoints
The Anyscale team shared how you can achieve considerable speedups for model loading in production with examples on the Llama 2 variants.
fgfm··on Mistral 7B
Well, that was a blog post, but they just released a research paper. And in comparison to the blogpost, they indeed added more information regarding the attention mechanism they used, details about the architecture, more evaluation results (Arena Elo rating) etc.

Not saying it's novel, but it's useful from a research perspective and well appreciated that they added new information in there I would say. But let me know if you feel differently

fgfm··on Mistral 7B
The research paper by Mistral about their Mistral 7B v0.1
fgfm··on Mistral AI – Bringing open AI models to the frontier
The Mistral AI team added an article with additional context on their efforts beyond their new 7B model & their commitment to OSS!
fgfm··on OctoPack: Instruction Tuning Code Large Language Models
New code LLM released by the BigCode team from HuggingFace achieving 46.2 on HumanEval by including commits in the training set.
fgfm··on Pixi: A new package manager for Python written in Rust
A new open-source package manager created by the authors of Mamba (C++ re-implementation of Conda). Looks like poetry and conda in one blazing fast project, looking forward to try it out!
fgfm··on LPython: Novel, Fast, Retargetable Python Compiler
A new Python high-performance compiler that could compete with Mojo before it even releases.
fgfm··on Universal and Transferable Attacks on Aligned Language Models
Study on adversarial attacks on LLMs to steer their objective into misalignment.
fgfm··on PanGu-Coder2: SOTA for Code LLMs on 15B
There is a new code LLM in town, and with only 15B params, it reaches 62.20% pass@1 on HumanEval!
fgfm··on Goat AI releases GOAT-7B
Goat AI just released their new model Goat-7b which surpasses Vicuna, Alpaca & LLaMA 2 in their 7b versions.
fgfm··on The economic impact of GitHub Copilot
GitHub just released a report about their ongoing experimentation with Copilot over a million users. Interestingly enough, it highlights the increase in acceptance rate over time. But I'd be curious to distinguish pure performance increase of Copilot as an API vs. learning curve of users to prompt it correctly.
fgfm··on Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM
Really neat job guys! Some people see it as an inferior version of Salesforce, which goes beyond a CRM. But for a dev who loves open source & is looking for something that does only what a CRM does, it looks surprisingly good!

I have to give it a try :D

fgfm··on Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models
The repo the paper is pointing to indicates that the code will be released within ~1 week! If the sheer difference in VRAM requirements and latency holds up, this will seriously be a major breakthrough for LLM architectures!

Can't wait to try it out

fgfm··on Meta introduces CM3leon, a more efficient image generation model
The funnily interesting aspect here is that they actually managed to get consistent hand generation, which has been quite a problem for Midjourney, Dall-E & co until now!

All details in the paper: https://shorturl.at/fnAMX

fgfm··on State of AI Development
Replit just released a report on OpenAI dominance in AI-related projects & the growing importance of HuggingFace and LangChain.

The competition between HuggingFace & Replicate on open source models hosting looks fierce. But I was mostly surprised to see the evolution of Javascript vs Python in the last quarters: ggml, llama.cpp and those are offering inference speed gains but for environments that aren't Javascript driven. Does this come from high-level wrappers on ML service hosting platforms?