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The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

taalas.com

151–160 of 471 posts

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#151

The speed of the chatbot's response is startling when you're used to the simulated fast typing of ChatGPT and others. But the Llama 3.1 8B model Taalas uses predictably results in incorrect answers, hallucinations, poor reliability as a chatbot. What type of latency-sensitive applications are appropriate for a small-model, high-throughput solution like this? I presume this type of specialization is necessary for robo…

I'm wondering how much the output quality of a small model could be boosted by taking multiple goes at it. Generate 20 answers and feed them back through with a "rank these responses" prompt. Or doing something like MCTS.

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#153
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t make any sense to think you need the whole server to run one model. It’s much more likely that each server runs 10 instances of the model 1. It doesn’t make sense in terms of architecture. It’s one chip. You can’t split one model over 10 identical hardwire chips 2. It doesn’t add up with their claims of better power efficiency. 2.4kW for one model would be really bad.

Thanks for having a brain. Not sure who started that "split into 10 chips" claim, it's just dumb. This is Llama 3B hardcoded (literally) on one chip. That's what the startup is about, they emphasize this multiple times.

It’s just dumb to think that one chip per model is their plan. They stated that their plan is to chain multiple chips together.

I was indeed wrong about 10 chips. I thought they would use llama 8B 16bit and a few thousand context size. It turns out, they used llama 8B 3bit with around 1k context size. That made me assume they must have chained multiple chips together since the max SRAM on TSMC n6 for reticle sized chip is only around 3GB.

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incredibly fast, on that I agree, but even simple queries I tried got very inaccurate answers. Which makes sense, it's essentially a trade off of how much time you give it to "think", but if it's fast to the point where it has no accuracy, I'm not sure I see the appeal.

If it's incredibly fast at a 2022 state of the art level of accuracy, then surely it's only a matter of time until it's incredibly fast at a 2026 level of accuracy.

yeah this is mindblowing speed. imagine this with opus 4.6 or gpt 5.2. probably coming soon

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses 10 chips for 8B model. It’d need 80 chips for an 80b model. Each chip is the size of an H100. So 80 H100 to run at this speed. Can’t change the model after you manufacture the chips since it’s etched into silicon.

As many others in this conversation have asked, can we have some sources on the idea that the model is spread across chips? You keep making the claim, but no one (myself included) else has any idea where that information comes from or if it is correct.

I was indeed wrong about 10 chips. I thought they would use llama 8B 16bit and a few thousand context size. It turns out, they used llama 8B 3bit with only 1k context size. That made me assume they must have chained multiple chips together since the max SRAM on TSMC n6 for reticle sized chip is only around 3GB.

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incredibly fast, on that I agree, but even simple queries I tried got very inaccurate answers. Which makes sense, it's essentially a trade off of how much time you give it to "think", but if it's fast to the point where it has no accuracy, I'm not sure I see the appeal.

If it's incredibly fast at a 2022 state of the art level of accuracy, then surely it's only a matter of time until it's incredibly fast at a 2026 level of accuracy.

Why do you assume this?

I can produce total jibberish even faster, doesn’t mean I produce Einstein level thought if I slow down

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#157
If they made a low power/mobile version, this could be really huge for embedded electronics. Mass produced, highly efficient "good enough" but still sort of dumb ais could put intelligence in house hold devices like toasters, light switches, and toilets. Truly we could be entering into the golden age of curses.

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#158
post #21

This is not a general purpose chip but specialized for high speed, low latency inference with small context. But it is potentially a lot cheaper than Nvidia for those purposes. Tech summary: - 15k tok/sec on 8B dense 3bit quant (llama 3.1) - limited KV cache - 880mm^2 die, TSMC 6nm, 53B transistors - presumably 200W per chip - 20x cheaper to produce - 10x less energy per token for inference - max context size: flexib…

This math is useful. Lots of folks scoffing in the comments below. I have a couple reactions, after chatting with it: 1) 16k tokens / second is really stunningly fast. There’s an old saying about any factor of 10 being a new science / new product category, etc. This is a new product category in my mind, or it could be. It would be incredibly useful for voice agent applications, realtime loops, realtime video generati…

I think the next major innovation is going to be intelligent model routing. I've been exploring OpenClaw and OpenRouter, and there is a real lack of options to select the best model for the job and execute. The providers are trying to do that with their own models, but none of them offer everything to everyone at all times. I see a future with increasingly niche models being offered for all kinds of novel use cases. We need a way to fluidly apply the right model for the job.

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#159
post #121

Holy cow their chatapp demo!!! I for first time thought i mistakenly pasted the answer. It was literally in a blink of an eye.!! https://chatjimmy.ai/

I dunno, it pretty quickly got stuck; the "attach file" didn't seem to work, and when I asked "can you see the attachment" it replied to my first message rather than my question.

It’s llama 3.1 8B. No vision, not smart. It’s just a technical demo.

Re: The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

#160

If it's not reprogrammable, it's just expensive glass. If you etch the bits into silicon, you then have to accommodate the bits by physical area, which is the transistor density for whatever modern process they use. This will give you a lower bound for the size of the wafers. This can give huge wafers for a very set model which is old by the time it is finalized. Etching generic functions used in ML and common fused…

Models don’t get old as fast as they used to. A lot of the improvements seem to go into making the models more efficient, or the infrastructure around the models. If newer models mainly compete on efficiency it means you can run older models for longer on more efficient hardware while staying competitive.

If power costs are significantly lower, they can pay for themselves by the time they are outdated. It also means you can run more instances of a model in one datacenter, and that seems to be a big challenge these days: simply building an enough data centres and getting power to them. (See the ridiculous plans for building data centres in space)

A huge part of the cost with making chips is the masks. The transistor masks are expensive. Metal masks less so.

I figure they will eventually freeze the transistor layer and use metal masks to reconfigure the chips when the new models come out. That should further lower costs.

I don’t really know if this makes sanse. Depends on whether we get new breakthroughs in LLM architecture or not. It’s a gamble essentially. But honestly, so is buying nvidia blackwell chips for inference. I could see them getting uneconomical very quickly if any of the alternative inference optimised hardware pans out

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