Live data from Hacker News

Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

storage.googleapis.com

71–80 of 183 posts

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fairly easy to pay OpenAI or Mistral money to use their API's. Figuring out how Google Cloud Vertex works and how it's billed is more complicated. Azure and AWS are similar in how complex they are to use for this. Could Google Cloud please provide an OpenAI compatible API and service? I know it's a different department. But it'd make using your models way easier. It often feels like Google Cloud has no UX or end…

Happy to pass on any feedback to our Google Cloud friends. :)

Thank you!

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#72
post #44

Nice! Can you explain what you mean by "simulate training beyond the number of available tokens"? Why does using distillation from a larger model simulate training with more tokens?

Surya here from the core Gemma team -- we can think of a distillation loss as learning to model the entire distribution of tokens that are likely to follow the prefix thus far, instead of only the token in the training example. If you do some back of the envelope calculations, we can see that learning to model a larger distribution yields many more bits of information to learn from.

Gotcha. That makes sense. Thanks!

What are the theories as to why this works better than training on a larger quantity of non-simulated tokens?

Is it because the gradient from the non-simulated tokens is too noisy for a small model to model correctly?

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#75
post #42

This is a great release! If you are looking to try it locally with a great interface, I am working on an app [1] and I just pushed an update to support Gemma2. 1: https://msty.app

Wow, msty looks really cool. I've bookmarked it to look into more later as a replacement for how I use a locally-hosted instance of LibreChat. It'd be a huge improvement to use local models rather than remote ones, for much of my queries.

That said, do you have a reason for keeping msty closed source rather than open? I read your FAQ for "why should I trust msty" and it feels lacking.

> We are a small team of developers who are passionate about AI and privacy. We have worked on projects before that have been used by thousands of people such as this (I've never heard of Cleavr). There are real faces (real faces = Twitter account link?) behind the product. And come chat with us on our Discord server to know us better.

This is much, much better than having no attribution, but it's miles away from being able to verify trust by reading the code. Would love to hear what your reasons against this are.

Still thinking about trying it out, anyway...

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#76
post #7

I gave up hope on r"Gem[ma|ini]" long time ago. I don't believe that Google can't produce good LLMs because of its massive company size; Microsoft is also a giant company (more market cap than Google) but it keeps surprising us with the ϕ models. I think Google just lacks the vision to understand what makes a good LLM. Theoretical contributions by research teams are valuable, but the real-world is built around engine…

>long time ago

This is an incredible statement to make about a field that no one was talking about 24 months ago, a family of SOTA models that didn't exist until 8 months ago, and a family of small local models that didn't exist 6 months ago. But sure, give up hope after the first generation of a model family doesn't impress you.

People seem to forget how incredibly early we are in this whole thing. The fact that so much progress has been made in such a short amount of time should make everyone super excited!

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#77
post #76
post #7

I gave up hope on r"Gem[ma|ini]" long time ago. I don't believe that Google can't produce good LLMs because of its massive company size; Microsoft is also a giant company (more market cap than Google) but it keeps surprising us with the ϕ models. I think Google just lacks the vision to understand what makes a good LLM. Theoretical contributions by research teams are valuable, but the real-world is built around engine…

>long time ago This is an incredible statement to make about a field that no one was talking about 24 months ago, a family of SOTA models that didn't exist until 8 months ago, and a family of small local models that didn't exist 6 months ago. But sure, give up hope after the first generation of a model family doesn't impress you. People seem to forget how incredibly early we are in this whole thing. The fact that so…

To be fair, LLMs (especially Google LLMs) aren't merely 24 months old. This is part of a long line of models that draw their heritage from BERT and t5-flan. Google has been at this longer than most, particularly in the field of edge-compute models. This isn't even close to a first-generation model family.

That's not to say this is an insignificant contribution. New models are great, especially when released for free, and it's important for big firms to keep the ball rolling for tech to progress. Though there is also legitimate concern that all LLMs aren't improving as fast as they used to improve, and we may have hit the proverbial bathtub curve of AI progress.

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#78

Hello (again) from the Gemma team! We are quite excited to push this release out and happy to answer any questions! Opinions are our own and not of Google DeepMind.

It's fairly easy to pay OpenAI or Mistral money to use their API's. Figuring out how Google Cloud Vertex works and how it's billed is more complicated. Azure and AWS are similar in how complex they are to use for this. Could Google Cloud please provide an OpenAI compatible API and service? I know it's a different department. But it'd make using your models way easier. It often feels like Google Cloud has no UX or end…

If you're an individual developer and not an enterprise, just go straight to Google AIStudio or GeminiAPI instead: https://aistudio.google.com/app/apikey. It's dead simple getting an API key and calling with a rest client.

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#79

Hello (again) from the Gemma team! We are quite excited to push this release out and happy to answer any questions! Opinions are our own and not of Google DeepMind.

It's fairly easy to pay OpenAI or Mistral money to use their API's. Figuring out how Google Cloud Vertex works and how it's billed is more complicated. Azure and AWS are similar in how complex they are to use for this. Could Google Cloud please provide an OpenAI compatible API and service? I know it's a different department. But it'd make using your models way easier. It often feels like Google Cloud has no UX or end…

Gemini models on Vertex AI can be called via a preview OpenAI-compatible endpoint [1], but shoving it into existing tooling where you don't have programmatic control over the API key and is long lived is non-trivial because GCP uses short lived access tokens (and long-lived ones are not great security-wise).

Billing for the Gemini models (on Vertex AI, the Generative Language AI variant still charges by tokens) I would argue is simpler than every other provider, simply because you're charged by characters/image/video-second/audio-second and don't need to run a tokenizer (if it's even available cough Claude 3 and Gemini) and having to figure out what the chat template is to calculate the token cost per message [2] or figure out how to calculate tokens for an image [3] to get cost estimates before actually submitting the request and getting usage info back.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/multim...

[2]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-generation/mana...

[3]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/vision/calculating-c...

Re: Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size [pdf]

#80
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>long time ago This is an incredible statement to make about a field that no one was talking about 24 months ago, a family of SOTA models that didn't exist until 8 months ago, and a family of small local models that didn't exist 6 months ago. But sure, give up hope after the first generation of a model family doesn't impress you. People seem to forget how incredibly early we are in this whole thing. The fact that so…

To be fair, LLMs (especially Google LLMs) aren't merely 24 months old. This is part of a long line of models that draw their heritage from BERT and t5-flan. Google has been at this longer than most, particularly in the field of edge-compute models. This isn't even close to a first-generation model family. That's not to say this is an insignificant contribution. New models are great, especially when released for free,…

I think there is valid criticism of google for inventing a cool technology only to have the rest of the industry discover its usefulness before them. But to say Gemini 1.0 or OG Gemma aren't first generation models because BERT and flan existed before is like saying the iPad wasn't a first generation device because Apple made the Newton. Like sure, they're the same in that they're transformers trained on language and text, but these are new families of models. The training mechanisms are different, their architectures are different, the data sets are different, the intended purpose of the models are completely different, etc. At some point I guess it's a semantic difference, maybe.
Post reply on HN