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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#291
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about using some of that money to develop CUDA alternatives so everyone is not paying the Nvidia tax?

It seems like rocm is already fully ready for transformer inference, so you are just referring to training?

ROCm is buggy and largely undocumented. That’s why we don’t use it.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The National Science Foundation has been doing this for decades, starting with the supercomputing centers in the 80s. Long before anyone talked about cloud credits, NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture. (The office name is from the early 00s) - https://new.nsf.gov/cise/oac (To conn…

> NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture This would be the logical place to put such a programme.

The DoE has also been a fairly active purchaser of GPUs for almost two decades now thanks to the Exascale Computing Project [0] and other predecessor projects.

The DoE helped subsidize development of Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, etc along with the underlying stack like NVLink, NGC, CUDA, etc either via purchases or allowing grants to be commercialized by Nvidia. They also played matchmaker by helping connect private sector research partners with Nvidia.

The DoE also did the same thing for AMD and Intel.

[0] - https://www.exascaleproject.org/

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#293
post #74

> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much ever…

> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B Is it possible to run this with ollama?

[deleted]

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#294
post #95
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they won't. The investment in the Heavy Press Program was the initial build, and just citing one example, the Alcoa 50,000 ton forging press was built in 1955, operated until 2008, and needed ~$100M to get it operational again in 2012. The investment was made to build the press, which created significant jobs and capital investment. The press, and others like it, were subsequently operated by and then sold…

I don't think there's a shortage of capital for AI... probably the opposite Of all the things to expand the scope of government spending why would they choose AI, or more specifically GPUs?

There may however, be a shortage of capital for open source AI, which is the subject under consideration.

As for the why... because there's no shortage of capital for AI. It sounds like the government would like to encourage redirecting that capital to something that's good for the economy at large, rather than good for the investors of a handful of Silicon Valley firms interested only in their own short term gains.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#295

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].…

I just watched this 1950s DoD video on the heavy press program and highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#296

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].…

The National Science Foundation has been doing this for decades, starting with the supercomputing centers in the 80s. Long before anyone talked about cloud credits, NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture. (The office name is from the early 00s) - https://new.nsf.gov/cise/oac (To conn…

As you've rightly pointed out, we have the mechanism, now let's fund it properly!

I'm in Canada, and our science funding has likewise fallen year after year as a proportion of our GDP. I'm still benefiting from A100 clusters funded by tax payer dollars, but think of the advantage we'd have over industry if we didn't have to fight over resources.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just the inference code. Not training code or evaluation code or whatever pre/post processing they do.

Is there an LLM with actual open source training code and dataset? Besides BLOOM https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom

Yes, there are a few dozen full open source models (license, code, data, models)

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just the inference code. Not training code or evaluation code or whatever pre/post processing they do.

Is there an LLM with actual open source training code and dataset? Besides BLOOM https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom

Here you go - https://github.com/apple/corenet

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#299
post #74

> We’re releasing Llama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open source AI model, as well as new and improved Llama 3.1 70B and 8B models. Bravo! While I don't agree with Zuck's views and actions on many fronts, on this occasion I think he and the AI folks at Meta deserve our praise and gratitude. With this release, they have brought the cost of pretraining a frontier 400B+ parameter model to ZERO for pretty much ever…

"Come to think of it, the negative impact on such competitors was likely a key motivation for releasing the new models."

"Commoditize Your Complement" is often cited here: https://gwern.net/complement

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#300

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].…

It makes much more sense to invest in a next generation fab for GPUs than to buy GPUs and more closely matches this kind of project.
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