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The Llama 4 herd

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Re: The Llama 4 herd

#112
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I’d prefer that LLMs did not refer to themselves as “I”. It’s software, not an “I”.

My pet peeve is when an LLM starts off a statement with "honestly, ..." Like what? You would lie to me? I go nuts when I see that. Year ago I caught myself using "honestly ...", and I immediately trained myself out of it once I realized what it implies.

"I'd normally lie to you but," is not what's actually implied when "Honestly," is used conversationally. If you overthink things like this you're going to have a tough time communicating with people.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#113
It's interesting that there are no reasoning models yet, 2.5 months after DeepSeek R1. It definitely looks like R1 surprised them. The released benchmarks look good.

Large context windows will definitely be the trend in upcoming model releases. I'll soon be adding a new benchmark to test this more effectively than needle-in-a-haystack (there are already a couple of benchmarks that do that).

All these models are very large, it will be tough for enthusiasts to run them locally.

The license is still quite restrictive. I can see why some might think it doesn't qualify as open source.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#114
post #59

> These models are our best yet thanks to distillation from Llama 4 Behemoth, a 288 billion active parameter model with 16 experts that is our most powerful yet and among the world’s smartest LLMs. Llama 4 Behemoth outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on several STEM benchmarks. Llama 4 Behemoth is still training, and we’re excited to share more details about it even while it’s still in flight.

With 2T params (!!), it better outperform everything else.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#115
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I’d prefer that LLMs did not refer to themselves as “I”. It’s software, not an “I”.

My pet peeve is when an LLM starts off a statement with "honestly, ..." Like what? You would lie to me? I go nuts when I see that. Year ago I caught myself using "honestly ...", and I immediately trained myself out of it once I realized what it implies.

"Honestly" and "literally" are now used in English for emphasis. I dislike this, but it's the current reality. I don't think there's any way to get back to only using them with their original meanings.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#116

The (smaller) Scout model is really attractive for Apple Silicon. It is 109B big but split up into 16 experts. This means that the actual processing happens in 17B. Which means responses will be as fast as current 17B models. I just asked a local 7B model (qwen 2.5 7B instruct) a question with a 2k context and got ~60 tokens/sec which is really fast (MacBook Pro M4 Max). So this could hit 30 token/sec. Time to first…

109B at Q6 is also nice for Framework Desktop 128GB.

I don't understand Framework's desktop offerings. For laptops their open approach makes sense, but desktops are already about as hackable and DIY as they come.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but the upside of Apple Silicon is that larger memory sizes are comparatively cheap (compared to buying the equivalent amount of 5090 or 4090). Also you can download quantizations.

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't think I've ever seen quants lower memory reqs. I assumed that was because they still have to be unpacked for inference. (please do correct me if I'm wrong, I contribute to llama.cpp and am attempting to land a client on everything from Android CPU to Mac GPU)

Quantization by definition lower memory requirements - instead of using f16 for weights, you are using q8, q6, q4, or q2 which means the weights are smaller by 2x, ~2.7x, 4x or 8x respectively.

That doesn’t necessarily translate to the full memory reduction because of interim compute tensors and KV cache, but those can also be quantized.

Re: The Llama 4 herd

#119
> while pre-training our Llama 4 Behemoth model using FP8 and 32K GPUs

I thought they used a lot more GPUs to train frontier models (e.g. xAi training on 100k). Can someone explain why they are using so few?

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