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Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

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Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#131
post #92
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for quick reference: LLM - the model weights - the data of the model itself LoRA - a small addition to the model for more efficient fine-tuning and distribution

Tell us more about LoRA

Instead of a matrix NN they use two matrices, Nd and d*N, and assuming d << N it would be like a lightweight addition. Keeping the original matrix unchanged, this new addition is simply added in parallel and initialised to low values.

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#132
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must have missed somethig, how can you run GPT-4 or ChatGPT locally?

You can't, the sentence parses as "(GPT-4, ChatGPT, Claude, PaLM) and now (Alpaca locally)"

Aha, thanks. That makes a LOT more sense.

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#133

I love the Disclaimer at the bottom. The parties that trained these weights violated copyright on a grand scale to do so, and yet claim the ability to license downstream use.

Doesn't current US law suggest that you can't copyright model weights?

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#134
post #76

Zero-shot translation capabilities (note: doesn't work with all languages well) > translate into japanese: "I am going to school today, but it is raining." 日本語で 「今天は学校に行きますが、雨が吹いている」

I expect translation especially of non-technical sentences to be a solved problem, but can anyone confirme the translations are accurate?

吹いている ought to be 降っている and 今天 is not a word, it should be 今日

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#135

Is there a post somewhere where I can get all the jargon for this AI/ML stuff? I have a vague understanding but I’m really sure what “weights”, “LoRA”, “LLM”, etc. are to really understand where each tool and concept fit in.

This is a truly great writeup: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#136

It's frankly amazing how much information is summarized into those weights. You do need to take whatever it says with a very healthy pinch of salt. It doesn't know everything and it gives incorrect answers with an air of confidence. Here's an example: > who preceded emperor Commodus? The first emperor of Rome was Nerva (98-100 AD). He succeeded Domitian and came to power after a brief civil war in 69AD, which saw the…

I think a really interesting area of further research into LLMs is going to be how to further decouple "intelligence" from "knowledge". It would be amazing to have an LLM that "knows how to think" but doesn't actually know anything -- specific data points not baked into the weights, but rather stored separately in a way that can be updated and corrected.

Perhaps a step forward is the "toolformer" router, making the LLM recognize when it is referencing a fact and have it look that up (use a "tool") instead of trying to infer it. I realize that even semantically this is kind of a fine line, hard facts vs inferences, so there's some philosophy to ponder here. What can be 'stored' and what can be 'calculated'. What kind of knowledge is innate to intelligent reasoning and what kind acts more like a lookup table.

But, exactly because we can't easily define these two categories, I have a feeling that if LLMs are trained to actually learn by themselves how to distinguish them in a "fuzzy" way, we might start getting somewhere.

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#137

Wait, alpaca got released? I thought Stanford was waiting for Facebook to approve it.

The training code, parameters and training dataset got released, and the training process only takes a few hours. Anyone can recreate it.

Actually it seems that Alpaca is not actually released. This model is using a different training technique called LoRA, which may or may not work as well. People are making a lot of unsubstantiated performance claims, saying this is as good as GPT-3 when not nearly enough evaluation has been done to demonstrate that yet.

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#138
Genuinely curious since I don't want to brick my mac :) - It seems that there are more than a handful of segmentation faults happening for various users running this program on their Mac's. Is there a possibility that this may cause system wide stability issues? Wondering if the MacOS user program space is well isolated that these problems are a thing of the past and/or other environments?

Also, ChatGPT seems ambivalent about it -

"However, it is worth noting that modern operating systems like macOS have built-in protections to prevent user-level programs from accessing sensitive system resources, which can help mitigate the impact of a segmentation fault.

In summary, running a faulty program written in C language that crashes with a segmentation fault can potentially cause system stability issues on a Mac, but the exact impact will depend on a variety of factors. It is generally a good practice to test and debug programs thoroughly before running them on any system, especially if they involve sensitive or critical resources."

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#139

Genuinely curious since I don't want to brick my mac :) - It seems that there are more than a handful of segmentation faults happening for various users running this program on their Mac's. Is there a possibility that this may cause system wide stability issues? Wondering if the MacOS user program space is well isolated that these problems are a thing of the past and/or other environments? Also, ChatGPT seems ambival…

An application crashing, except in very specific scenarios which don’t apply here, won’t interfere with the rest of the os.

Re: Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a MacBook

#140
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that AI/ML jargon can be confusing. Here's a brief explanation of some common terms and concepts to help you better understand them: Weights: In machine learning, weights are parameters used in models to determine the strength of the relationship between input features and the output prediction. They are learned during the training process and are adjusted to minimize the error in the model's predictions…

Good job hallucinating with LoRA. I wonder if the paper was published after knowledge cut-off date.. (it stands for Low-Rank Adaptation).

It was published in June 2021, which is before the cutoff date of September 2021, but not by much.
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