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AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

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Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#101
post #39

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Maybe it's possible, but consider that some really smart people, in many different groups, have been working diligently in this space for quite a while; so claims of 95% savings on energy costs _with equivalent performance_ is in the extraordinary category. Of course, we'll see when the tide goes out.

I mean, all these smart people would rather pay NVIDIA all their money than make AMD viable. And yet they tell us its all MatMul.

It's not their job to make AMD viable, it's AMD's job to make AMD viable. NVIDIA didn't get their position for free, they spent a decade refining CUDA and its tooling before GPU-based crypto and AI kicked off.

Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#102
post #23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite: It's taking advantage of (1+a)(1+b) = 1 + a + b + ab. And where a and b are both small-ish, ab is really small and can just be ignored. So it turns the (1+a)(1+b) into 1+a+b. Which is definitely not the same! But it turns out, machine guessing apparently doesn't care much about the difference.

You might then as well replace the multiplication by the addition in the original network. In that case you're not even approximating anything. Am I missing something?

They're applying that simplification to the exponent bits of an 8 bit float. The range is so small that the approximation to multiplication is going to be pretty close.

Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#103
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are imaging LLMs are capable of much more than they actually are. Here's the only thing they are good for. https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/112006855076082650 > You might be surprised to learn that I actually think LLMs have the potential to be not only fun but genuinely useful. “Show me some bullshit that would be typical in this context” can be a genuinely helpful question to have answered, in code and in natur…

No, I'm not imagining things. You are, however, imaging (incorrectly) that I'm not an expert with AI who's already seen superhuman performance out of LLM prompts in the vast majority of every software development question I've ever asked them, starting all the way back at GPT-3.5.

So, where are all of your world changing innovations driven by these superhuman capabilities?

Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#104
It's a very crude approximation, e.g. 1.75 * 2.5 == 3 (although it seems better as the numbers get closer to 0).

I tried implementing this for AVX512 with tinyBLAS in llamafile.

    inline __m512 lmul512(__m512 x, __m512 y) {
        __m512i sign_mask = _mm512_set1_epi32(0x80000000);
        __m512i exp_mask = _mm512_set1_epi32(0x7F800000);
        __m512i mant_mask = _mm512_set1_epi32(0x007FFFFF);
        __m512i exp_bias = _mm512_set1_epi32(127);
        __m512i x_bits = _mm512_castps_si512(x);
        __m512i y_bits = _mm512_castps_si512(y);
        __m512i sign_x = _mm512_and_si512(x_bits, sign_mask);
        __m512i sign_y = _mm512_and_si512(y_bits, sign_mask);
        __m512i exp_x = _mm512_srli_epi32(_mm512_and_si512(x_bits, exp_mask), 23);
        __m512i exp_y = _mm512_srli_epi32(_mm512_and_si512(y_bits, exp_mask), 23);
        __m512i mant_x = _mm512_and_si512(x_bits, mant_mask);
        __m512i mant_y = _mm512_and_si512(y_bits, mant_mask);
        __m512i sign_result = _mm512_xor_si512(sign_x, sign_y);
        __m512i exp_result = _mm512_sub_epi32(_mm512_add_epi32(exp_x, exp_y), exp_bias);
        __m512i mant_result = _mm512_srli_epi32(_mm512_add_epi32(mant_x, mant_y), 1);
        __m512i result_bits = _mm512_or_si512(
            _mm512_or_si512(sign_result, _mm512_slli_epi32(exp_result, 23)), mant_result);
        return _mm512_castsi512_ps(result_bits);
    }
Then I used it for Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct.F16.gguf and it outputted jibberish. So you would probably have to train and design your model specifically to use this multiplication approximation in order for it to work. Or maybe I'd have to tune the model so that only certain layers and/or operations use the approximation. However the speed was decent. Prefill only dropped from 850 tokens per second to 200 tok/sec on my threadripper. Prediction speed was totally unaffected, staying at 34 tok/sec. I like how the code above generates vpternlog ops. So if anyone ever designs an LLM architecture and releases weights on Hugging Face that use this algorithm, we'll be able to run them reasonably fast without special hardware.

Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#106
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it’s a life changing productivity booster? Sometimes I look at my projects and wonder how would I explain it to an LLM what this code should have done if it didn’t exist yet. Must be a shitton of boilerplate programming for copilot to be a life-changing experience.

You haven't used them enough. Everytime an LLM reduces my search from 1min to 5s, the LLM pays. Just summary features: save me 20min of reading a transcript, turn it into 20s. That's a huge enabler.

Overviews aren’t code though. In code, for me, they don’t pass 80/20 tests well enough, sometimes even on simple cases. (You get 50-80% of an existing function/block with some important context prepended and a comment, let it write the rest and check if it succeeds). It doesn’t mean that LLMs are useless. Or that I am antillamist or a denier - I’m actually an enthusiast. But this specific claim I hear often and don’t find true. Maybe true for repetitive code in boring environments where typing and remembering formats/params over and over is the main issue. Not in actual code.

If I paste the actual non-trivial code, it starts deviating fast. And it isn’t too complex, it’s just less like “parallel sort two arrays” and more like “wait for an image on a screenshot by execing scrot (with no sound) repeatedly and passing the result to this detect-cv2.py script and use all matching options described in this ts type, get stdout json as in this ts type, and if there’s a match, wait for the specified anim timeout and test again to get the settled match coords after an animation finishes; throw after a total timeout”. Not a rocket science, pretty dumb shit, but right there they fall flat and start imagining things, heavily.

I guess it shines if you ask it to make an html form, but I couldn’t call that life-changing unless I had to make these damn forms all day.

Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#107
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't used them enough. Everytime an LLM reduces my search from 1min to 5s, the LLM pays. Just summary features: save me 20min of reading a transcript, turn it into 20s. That's a huge enabler.

If 20 mins of informations can legitimately be condensed into 20 seconds, it sounds like the original wasn't worth reading in the first place. Could have skipped the llm entirely.

I upvoted you, because I think you have a valid point. The tone is unnecessarily aggressive though.

Effective and information-dense communication is really hard. That doesn't mean we should just accept the useless fluff surrounding the actual information and/or analysis. People could learn a lot from the Ignoble Prize ceremony's 24/7 presentation model.

Sadly, it seems we are heading towards a future where you may need an LLM to distill the relevant information out of a sea of noise.

Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using copilot for several months. If I could figure out a way to measure its impact on my productivity, I'd probably see a single digit percentage boost in "productivity". This is not life-changing for me. And for some tasks, it's actually worse than nothing. As in, I spend time feeding it a task, and it just completely fails to do anything useful.

I've been using it for over a year I think. I don't often feed it tasks with comments so much as go about things the same as usual and let it autocomplete. The time and cognitive load saved adds up massively. I've had to go without it for a bit while my workplace gets its license in order for the corporate version and the personal version has an issue with the proxy, and it's been agonizing going without it again. I…

I don't know about you but LLMs spit out garbage nonsense frequent enough that I can't trust their output in any context I cannot personally verify the validity of.

Re: AI engineers claim new algorithm reduces AI power consumption by 95%

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using copilot for several months. If I could figure out a way to measure its impact on my productivity, I'd probably see a single digit percentage boost in "productivity". This is not life-changing for me. And for some tasks, it's actually worse than nothing. As in, I spend time feeding it a task, and it just completely fails to do anything useful.

I've been using it for over a year I think. I don't often feed it tasks with comments so much as go about things the same as usual and let it autocomplete. The time and cognitive load saved adds up massively. I've had to go without it for a bit while my workplace gets its license in order for the corporate version and the personal version has an issue with the proxy, and it's been agonizing going without it again. I…

> I almost forgot how much it sucks having to jump to google every other minute

Even allowing for some hyperbole, your programming experience is extremely different from mine. Looking anything up outside the IDE, let alone via Google, is by far the exception for me rather than the rule.

I've long suspected that this kind of difference explains a lot of the difference in how Copilot is perceived.

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