[HN Gopher] Petaflops to the People: From Personal Compute Clust...
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       Petaflops to the People: From Personal Compute Cluster to Person of
       Compute
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 52 points
       Date   : 2023-06-20 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.latent.space)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.latent.space)
        
       | croes wrote:
       | I see George Hotz and I think another interesting idea that gets
       | another half-baked implementation.
        
       | jxy wrote:
       | They are clearly scared of ggml.
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | thanks for posting tosh!
       | 
       | we were really honored that George granted us the first interview
       | on tiny corp. We even set up a dedicated podcast youtube for the
       | first time (Alessio and I are relative youtube newbs) and George
       | was kind enough to come back to Twitter just to help us kick it
       | off:
       | https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/167120786704580608...
       | 
       | Personal highlights for the HN crowd:
       | 
       | - the three theses of tiny are all interesting: the CISC/RISC
       | analogy, why you should start with software for commodity GPUs
       | rather than taping out chip design, why to avoid Turing complete
       | layers in the ML stack
       | 
       | - I loved comparing his natural debugging and CI style to John
       | Carmack - developers who assume geohot is a cowboy coder might be
       | surprised at how seriously he takes developer experience
       | 
       | - Dishing on tinygrad vs ggml and Mojo (i'll just leave it there,
       | its good)
       | 
       | - how everyone is in this mad quantization rush but nobody's
       | putting up benchmarks to show that it works (tinybox is
       | resolutely supporting non quantized LLaMA)
       | 
       | - hardware design constraint choices for tinybox (<60 decibels,
       | single power plug, etc)
       | 
       | and then we of course indulged in the array of offtopic convos
       | for fan service:
       | 
       | - GPT4 is just a mixture of experts - 8 GPT's in a trenchcoat
       | 
       | - Elon vs e/acc
       | 
       | - Rich Sutton's Bitter Lesson
       | 
       | - The Goddess of Everything Else (go listen to him read it
       | https://mixtape.swyx.io/episodes/the-goddess-of-everything-e...)
       | 
       | and of course, he's doing all this so that you'll consider
       | working on/for tiny. job application details on
       | https://tinygrad.org/
        
         | swyx wrote:
         | personal reflections from interviewing him:
         | 
         | - Idk how to say this but surprisingly not arrogant. we both
         | prepped by watching his lex fridman and prior livestreams, so
         | its not like we were dealing with an unknown quantity, but I've
         | never seen him interact with "normal" (technical, but not his
         | level of technical) people like us before. he was pretty
         | patient I think, except I definitely got roasted for suggesting
         | you could jailbreak the tinybox. instantly regretted it but he
         | only joked once aboout it which was super cool :)
         | 
         | - quite reasonable expectations for his AMD frustrations. the
         | fact that Lisa Su got personally involved and they listened was
         | also fantastic. this isn't a "tech diva flipping the table
         | because they stubbed their toe" story - AMD was found wanting
         | in basic documentation requirements, he raised the issue, they
         | took a while but eventually fixed it. Great partnership all
         | around imo
         | 
         | - hiring in the age of AI is really going to get strange. he
         | thinks we're ~20 years out from developer jobs being gone. Yes
         | he is essentially asking people to do work for small bounties.
         | in some circles, that's a no go. but it basically guarantees
         | that the candidate will be a fit, and is fine if you want to
         | keep the team tiny anyway. he also changed his mind on remote
         | work which is cool.
         | 
         | - this was the first time i heard anything materially different
         | about GPT4 architecture being a mixture of experts rather than
         | a 1 trillion super model. does raise the question about what
         | GPT5 will be built on if we have indeed run into the limits of
         | scaling model size.
         | 
         | - notes to future interviewers: george is ultra open (he
         | identifies strongly as a streamer, is very comfortable with
         | what he is saying and doesnt need a ton of prep or post
         | recording review) - just be super attentive to what he does and
         | does not want to talk about and let him riff and he will
         | indulge. i think we were maybe like a 7 out of 10 on getting
         | the best out of him, but hopefully we will be a lot better by
         | the time we go down to San Diego for the tinybox launch
         | :fingerscrossed:
         | 
         | - He gave us advice on whether or not we wanted to go big and
         | be the next Lex Fridman or stay niche and I think we were
         | pretty convicted on wanting to stay niche and technical. To my
         | knowledge there's no other podcast in the world that could have
         | had this deep-but-still-kinda-accessible conversation with
         | George and I strongly feel like something like this has to
         | exist.
        
         | lhl wrote:
         | > how everyone is in this mad quantization rush but nobody's
         | putting up benchmarks to show that it works (tinybox is
         | resolutely supporting non quantized LLaMA)
         | 
         | I don't think this is true. llama.cpp has historically been
         | very conscientious about benchmarking perplexity. Here's a
         | detailed chart of baseline FP16 vs the new k-quants:
         | https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/1684
         | 
         | While most evals aren't currently evaluating performance
         | between quantized models, there are two evals that are:
         | 
         | * Gotzmann LLM Score:
         | https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ikqqIaptv2P4_15Ytzro...
         | 
         | * llm-jeopardy: https://github.com/aigoopy/llm-jeopardy - You
         | can see that the same Airoboros 65B model goes from a score of
         | 81.62% to 80.00% going from an 8_0 to 5_1 quant, and 5_1
         | solidly beats out the 33B 8_0, as expected.
         | 
         | Also, GPTQ, SPQR, AWQ, SqueezeLLM all have arXiv papers and
         | every single team is running their own perplexity tests.
         | 
         | Now, that being said, every code base seems to be calculating
         | perplexity _slightly_ differently. I recently have been working
         | on trying to decode them all for apples-to-apples comparisons
         | between implementations.
        
           | georgehotz wrote:
           | I question if perplexity on wikitext is enough, I wonder if
           | someone has checked how well perplexity correlates with
           | https://github.com/google/BIG-bench
           | 
           | Fundamentally, I'm not sure if perplexity on a dataset that's
           | pretty much leaked everywhere will properly measure the task
           | performance of LLMs. But open to being wrong on this.
        
             | lhl wrote:
             | Forgot to mention that Fabrice Bellard has run lm-eval on a
             | range of functional tests (lambada, hellaswag, winogrande,
             | piqa, coqa) for q4, q8 (and unquantized on smaller) models:
             | https://bellard.org/ts_server/
             | 
             | Losses appear to be in-line (possibly less) than increases
             | in perplexity.
             | 
             | My intuition is that the dataset you use for testing
             | perplexity (c4, wikitext2, wikitext103, whatever) shouldn't
             | matter so much as long as its a representative sample of
             | data it's read. You're calculating cross entropy loss, so
             | you _want_ to have data you know it 's read to see how much
             | each quantization gets more wrong.
        
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