Free Dolly: First truly open instruction-tuned LLM

I don't expect so, but as LLMs get better more people want to use them in more places. An openly available LLM for commercial use which is easy to integrate in your existing databricks flow could be very tempting. That then leads to increased use of the platform & hours spent computing, so that's better for them.

It also shows how to build and train these things on databricks, so maybe more people will use them to make custom trained LLMs.

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As an academic researcher with a significant interest and time-investment in Transformer-based models, this restores my faith/hope in the trajectory of DL research. Considering it is difficult for academics to catch up to the industry regarding LLMs, seeing a continuation of the OPENness of these research works by a major industry player is a move in the right direction.

Any info on Pythia base model performance versus GPT-3 or 3.5? Couldn't find any benchmarks in the paper. I imagine LLaMA is ahead there.