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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

#201
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you should censor your post around the answer to the kms question. it isn't necessary

Not big on censorship, but I agree it's a bit too much. I linked to it externally if anyone's curious.

It’s not censorship if you’re doing it to yourself or with permission. That’s just editing.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! ChatGPT has been out for months, and really only in the last few weeks have i started using it as much as I should. I'm using an electron wrapper now, so it's a first class desktop app. With the plus subscription, the 3.5 is as fast as google.

what is an electron wrapper

I asked GPT-4 for you:

"An "Electron wrapper" refers to a software application created using Electron, a popular open-source framework. Electron allows developers to build cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

An Electron wrapper essentially "wraps" a web application inside a native desktop application, making it possible to run the web application as a standalone program on various operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux. This is particularly useful for developers who want to create desktop applications without having to write separate code for each platform. Instead, they can use their existing web application code and package it with Electron to create a desktop application that works across multiple platforms."

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

#203

How hard is it to get the Alpaca tuning on the larger LLaMA models? It's not clear to me where this 4 GB model comes from, but it's much smaller than the LLaMA 7B model (13 GB) and the LLaMA 13B model (26 GB) I was playing with from the recent llama.cpp HN post.

The 4GB model is 7B, AFAIK. It’s just quantized down to 4 bits instead of 16.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thesis behind the Hutter Prize was spot-on, except for focusing on lossless compression instead of lossy compression. http://prize.hutter1.net/

Lossless is actually the appropriate test. These models output probabilities and can easily be turned into very effective lossless compressors with the use of arithmetic encoding. For a very interesting discussion see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO4TPJkeaaU The real problem with the Hutter prize is that the data and compute are too small. It seems obvious now that the regime where compression turns into AGI is f…

>Lossless is actually the appropriate test

Could you elaborate on why that is. It seems very non-obvious to me.

In the realm of vision, after a certain point you would just be trying to compress noise that has nothing to do with the content of image/video.

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

#205

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.

I know it's downvote-worthy to suggest it but I really am so much more productive since I started using LLMs to explain technical jargon to me, it's very good at comparing technologies, so I can say "I understand x, but how is y different" and it will give an explanation fine tuned to my understanding -- this is a huge leap from the context-switching of opening a new tab and clicking on random websites looking for a…

This has been really the most productive use of it for me. But I'm so cheap I've been stopping myself more and more and just spending an extra minute googling to save the cent. Even if its just literally penny pinching, its also helping the environment! Is the velocity I get an answer worth the cycles? I'm not so sure these days, but its been interesting reflecting on this.

Definitely excited for the inevitable reports comparing the killowats spent cumulatively to get an answer through google vs openai. How many blogs visited does it take to spend the same amount of energy getting the answer from a model?

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lossless is actually the appropriate test. These models output probabilities and can easily be turned into very effective lossless compressors with the use of arithmetic encoding. For a very interesting discussion see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO4TPJkeaaU The real problem with the Hutter prize is that the data and compute are too small. It seems obvious now that the regime where compression turns into AGI is f…

>Lossless is actually the appropriate test Could you elaborate on why that is. It seems very non-obvious to me. In the realm of vision, after a certain point you would just be trying to compress noise that has nothing to do with the content of image/video.

That's OK. The purpose of the test is to compare approaches to compression. Noise in the dataset is a handicap but it affects all approaches, so it doesn't invalidate the test as a way to compare approaches. And true white noise is very rare, almost all real noise has characteristics that are at least somewhat compressible. And hopefully whoever constructs the dataset tries not to include tons of noise in it.

Lossless compression is a great objective because it's impossible to cheat. When you do lossy compression you have to define a quality metric and as soon as you do that the game becomes cheating the quality metric rather than actually compressing the data in a useful way.

I highly recommend watching the video I linked. Arithmetic encoding reduces the task of lossless compression to assigning probabilities for the next token, which is the exact task these models are trained to do.

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

#207
post #63

=> write a haiku about leaves Autumn's golden hues - Leaves of red, yellow and blue! \ #haikupoetry #leavesshort[1] > segmentation fault ./chat Interesting.

It's postmodernist

It really does kind of take on new poetic meaning as posted. Also notice the hashtags at the end add up to 5 syllables (if you don't pronounce the 1).

Weird, but cool.

Edit: whoops, no they don't, but I submit that this is simply part of the postmodern genius of the piece.

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I've saw this leaked chat prompt and that gave me some ideas. So under the hoods, ChatGPT is just a model like Llama where they prepend every user input with a context that makes it behave like a chatbot?

(I don't work at OpenAI so take it with a grain of salt) Yes and No they are similar. It is basically just a fancy autocomplete like llama, but I believe it's specifically been trained on chat content, or at least finetuned on such, and it probably uses a more chat focused labeling scheme on the training data as well to help it perform well on that specific task and be conversational.

To me it is really mind blowing that these properties (coding, emulate chatbot) emerge from just from feeding these neural nets with text data.

Thanks for the info.

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

#209
post #2

Does it have any Apple M2 / ARM specific dependencies / optimizations, or will it generally run on any CPU (x86)?

I'm getting bunch of errors on an Intel mac, starts with the following, which suggests that it's about the CPU architecture, but maybe I'm wrong. sysctl: unknown oid 'hw.optional.arm64'

same problem, haven't found a solution. Please let me know if you do

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting bunch of errors on an Intel mac, starts with the following, which suggests that it's about the CPU architecture, but maybe I'm wrong. sysctl: unknown oid 'hw.optional.arm64'

same problem, haven't found a solution. Please let me know if you do

Okay for what is worth, I was getting that as a warning but the ./chat executable works anyway. So give it a try if it is being compiled!
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