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The Coming of Local LLMs

nickarner.com

51–60 of 214 posts

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#51
post #49

As I see these things come out, it feels like there's not a lot of discussion on which hardware (that isn't one of the fancy new Macs?) As in, there might be a lot of graphics cards out there that could be used here? Is it only Nvidia still, is AMD a possibility? Maybe I'm missing something on how the tech works?

This has a list of models and their VRAM requirements

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/11o6o3f/how_to_...

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#52
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience with llama.cpp and oobaboogas webui I can say they are amazing, at least on my gaming pc. I’m absolutely astonished at the speed and quality of llama, alpaca, galactica and vicuna (the >10B parameters ones). Make no mistake, it’s for tinkerers that do not expect each prompt to be answered human like. I see them as creativity and thought testing tools, also knowledge exploratory.

Is there a "getting started" guide you'd recommend to a newbie to the space?

I started with ggerganov’s llama.cpp GitHub repo, and went from there. But then again, I know some programming, statistics and machine learning, so it may not be for you, I cannot judge that.

Models can be found on huggingface.co, and I’d start with eachadea/ggml-vicuna-13b-4bit, but it needs 10G of cpu-ram. It is very friendly to any prompt though.

I read on my way (on reddit, when I recall correctly), that there must be some really good intro videos on YouTube.

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#53
post #3

I expect we will see the biggest jump in performance if (when) consumer-grade coprocessors like mobile GPUs start incorporating attention layers as a primitive building block at the hardware level, e.g., with instructions and memory layouts engineered specifically to make ultra-low-precision (say, 4-bit) transformer layers as compute- and memory-efficient as possible on consumer devices. That seems almost inevitable…

Low precision: agreed Attention: Isn't it quadratic in context length? I dunno, this feels like the crude first iteration of something that will get inevitably passed by something that scales better.

Probably once context lengths get really long it might be better to use ANN rather than exact attention at inference time. I would imagine this would only pay off with ~100,000 token contexts, and even then it would only work if only a few tokens meaningfully contribute to each attention head.

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#54
post #7
post #2

It's great they got LLMs running on resource constrained devices but are they any good? Or I should ask, with the limited resources they get, what good are they for?

From my experience with llama.cpp and oobaboogas webui I can say they are amazing, at least on my gaming pc. I’m absolutely astonished at the speed and quality of llama, alpaca, galactica and vicuna (the >10B parameters ones). Make no mistake, it’s for tinkerers that do not expect each prompt to be answered human like. I see them as creativity and thought testing tools, also knowledge exploratory.

is there a difference in the quality of llm one would be able to train or run on a gpu with 8, 12, 16, all the way up to 24gb?

I'm trying to decide whether it's worth while to splurge on a more expensive 4090 vs a 4070 or whatever.

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#57
post #17

I was able to run a LLaMa on my personal machine to run some labeling on my documents, as a test of its capabilities. It was instruct tune. 30b parameters 4 example labels, and I had a binary classifier in seconds. Sure, semantic text classifiers were possible for a while, but making it accessible changes everything. Giving anyone who can use a spreadsheet the power of a local LLM (or, basically free LLMs) can make t…

The big thing for me and many others is the ability to use the tool without sending NDA data to a 3rd party.

The potential amplifying power of that is enormous.

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#58
post #45
post #17

I was able to run a LLaMa on my personal machine to run some labeling on my documents, as a test of its capabilities. It was instruct tune. 30b parameters 4 example labels, and I had a binary classifier in seconds. Sure, semantic text classifiers were possible for a while, but making it accessible changes everything. Giving anyone who can use a spreadsheet the power of a local LLM (or, basically free LLMs) can make t…

LLMs as general purpose classifiers is a really big deal, especially because you can give them fuzzy instructions. I know people are worried about LLMs and spam, but I think LLMs may provide an opportunity to elevate online discourse by being more efficient at filtering out spam and low quality commentary.

I already have a custom browser plugin that calls out to GPT (gpt-3.5-turbo is cheap and good enough for this) to classify and filter out low-effort, overly negative, or intellectually dishonest HN comments. It significantly improves the experience on this site.

Bonus points: I had never written a browser plugin, but GPT4 helped me do it in under half an hour.

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#59
post #26
post #19

I found this to be very liberating, that I can finally type whatever I want into the LLM, without the possibility of the government knowing what I am writing. Just being able to do that, and have the watchful eye of the state not being able to monitor you is amazing.

you have to check your screen's firmware for that

I mean I have moderately high certainty that I'm escaping casual surveillance. It's not perfect but it doesn't need to be perfect to be good enough.

Re: The Coming of Local LLMs

#60
post #3

I expect we will see the biggest jump in performance if (when) consumer-grade coprocessors like mobile GPUs start incorporating attention layers as a primitive building block at the hardware level, e.g., with instructions and memory layouts engineered specifically to make ultra-low-precision (say, 4-bit) transformer layers as compute- and memory-efficient as possible on consumer devices. That seems almost inevitable…

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