[HN Gopher] Mixtral of experts
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Mixtral of experts
        
       Author : georgehill
       Score  : 603 points
       Date   : 2023-12-11 08:01 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
        
       | jstummbillig wrote:
       | Is there a non-obvious reason that models keep getting compared
       | to GPT-3.5 instead of 4?
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | nobody can run gpt4 on their machine
        
           | jstummbillig wrote:
           | I am not sure what that means. How can they run GPT 3.5 any
           | more or less?
        
             | simonvc wrote:
             | GPT-3.5 (unfinetuned) has been matched by many OW (open
             | weights) models now, and with fine tuning to a specific
             | task (coding, customer care, health advice etc) can exceed
             | it.
             | 
             | It's still useful as a well known model to compare with,
             | since it's the model the most people have experience with.
        
             | stsquad wrote:
             | I think they mean the assumed parameter size of GPT-4 is so
             | large you couldn't run it on commodity hardware even if you
             | could get hold of the model.
        
             | karmasimida wrote:
             | The rumored GPT4 model size is 1.8 trillion parameters
        
         | baq wrote:
         | non-obvious? don't think so.
         | 
         | the obvious is GPT-4 blows them all out of the water in quality
         | and is completely trounced on quality/inference cost.
        
         | opdahl wrote:
         | Maybe because GPT-3.5 is a free model so it's basically
         | comparing free models with each other.
        
           | skerit wrote:
           | Most people I know that actually use ChatGPT, use the free
           | (GPT3.5) version. Not a lot of people are willing to pay the
           | extra 20 euros per month.
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | Yet, if you want to go cheaper, you totally can by paying
             | for the API access. Gpt4 is accessible there and you get to
             | use your own app. $20 will last you way longer then a month
             | if you're not a heavy user.
        
               | skerit wrote:
               | True. Though I myself still use ChatGPT a lot more as I
               | can quickly reach the $20 threshold via the API
        
               | rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
               | It really depends on usage. If you need to have long
               | conversations, or are sending huge texts, the all-you-
               | can-eat for $20 plan will almost certainly be cheaper
               | than API access.
               | 
               | If you're doing lots of smaller one shot stuff without a
               | lot of back and forth, the API will be cheaper.
        
             | criddell wrote:
             | Do you think it's getting close to the point where it adds
             | a euro of value per workday (on average) for them?
        
               | skerit wrote:
               | Depends on if they know how to use it. A lot of people
               | still think it's just a google and wikipedia replacement.
               | It doesn't really do anything super useful in that case.
        
         | dylanjcastillo wrote:
         | GPT-3.5 is probably the most popular model used in applications
         | (due to price point vs. GPT-4, and quality of results vs. open-
         | weight models).
         | 
         | So I guess they're trying to say now it's a no-brainer to
         | switch to open-weight models.
        
           | tyfon wrote:
           | I second this. For some type of applications, the 4 model can
           | quickly ramp up costs, especially with large contexts and 3.5
           | often does the job just fine.
           | 
           | So for many applications it's the real competitor.
        
           | anonylizard wrote:
           | Too bad GPT3.5 Turbo is dirt cheap. Open source models are
           | substantially more expensive when you factor in operating
           | costs. There is no mature ecosystem where you can just plug
           | in a model and spin up a robust infrastructure to run a local
           | LLM at scale, aka you need infrastructure/ML engineers to do
           | it, aka extremely expensive unless you are using LLMs at
           | extremely large scales.
        
             | dylanjcastillo wrote:
             | I think we'll start seeing a lot more services like
             | https://www.together.ai soon.
             | 
             | Having open-weight models better than gpt-3.5 will drive a
             | lot of competition on the LLM infra.
        
             | happycube wrote:
             | Mistral's endpoint for mistral-small is slightly cheaper.
        
             | Der_Einzige wrote:
             | The additional control/features (support for grammars,
             | constraints, fine-tuning, etc) far o/w the cost savings.
        
           | anonyfox wrote:
           | not only price but also speed and API limits.
           | 
           | I always ask myself the following pseudo-question: "for this
           | geneneration/classification task, do I need to be more
           | intelligent than an average highschool student?" Almost
           | always in business tasks, the answer is a no. Therefore I go
           | with GPT3.5. Its much quicker and good enough to accomplish
           | the task usually.
           | 
           | And then I need to run this task thousands of times, so the
           | API limits are the most limiting factor, which are _much_
           | higher in GPT3.5 variants, whereas when using GPT4 I have to
           | be more careful with limiting /queueing requests.
           | 
           | I patiently wait for a efficient enough model that only needs
           | to be on a GPT3.5 level I can self-host alongside my
           | applications with reasonably low server requirements. No need
           | for GPT-5 for now, for business automations the lower end of
           | "intelligence" is more than enough, but efficiency/scaling is
           | the real deal.
        
             | jstummbillig wrote:
             | Do you mind sharing some tasks that you are solving with
             | GPT 3.5? Be very concrete, if you don't mind. I am
             | struggling to make it work for my business use cases (i.e.
             | the ones where I am looking for "reliably helpful") and am
             | very much looking for inspiration to define the limits. The
             | hypothetical is interesting but seems to not do too much
             | for me on its own.
        
         | 0x008 wrote:
         | GPT3.5 is the most popular MoE model probably.
        
       | reqo wrote:
       | Can someone explain why MoE works? Is there any downside to MoE
       | compared to a regular model?
        
         | gorbypark wrote:
         | I'm still new to most of this (so please take this with a grain
         | of salt/correct me), but it seems that in this specific model,
         | there's eight separate 7B models. There is also a ~2B "model"
         | that acts as a router, in a way, where it picks the best two 7B
         | models for the next token. Those two models then generate the
         | next token and somehow they are added together.
         | 
         | Upside: much more efficient to run versus a single larger
         | model. The press release states 45B total parameters across the
         | 8x7B models, but it only takes 12B parameters worth of RAM to
         | run.
         | 
         | Downside: since the models are still "only" 7B, the output in
         | theory would be not as good as a single 45B param model.
         | However, how much less so is probably open for
         | discussion/testing.
         | 
         | No one knows (outside of OpenAI) for sure the size/architecture
         | of GPT-4, but it's rumoured to have a similar architecture, but
         | much larger. 1.8 trillion total params, but split up into 16
         | experts at around 111B params each is what some are
         | guessing/was leaked.
        
           | sebzim4500 wrote:
           | You are almost right:
           | 
           | * The routing happens in every feedforward layer (32 of these
           | iirc). Each of these layers has it's own 'gate' network which
           | picks which of the 8 experts are most promising. It runs the
           | two most promising and interpolates between them.
           | 
           | * In practice, all parameters still need to be in VRAM so
           | this is a bad architecture if you are VRAM constrained. The
           | benefit is you need less compute per token.
        
             | miven wrote:
             | I wonder what would be the most efficient tactic for
             | offloading select layers of such a model to a GPU within a
             | memory-constrained system
             | 
             | As far as I understand usually layer offloading in
             | something like llama.cpp loads the first few consecutive
             | layers to VRAM (the remainder being processed in the CPU)
             | such that you don't have too much back and forth between
             | the CPU and GPU.
             | 
             | I feel like such an approach would lead to too much wasted
             | potential in terms of GPU work when applied to a SMoE
             | model, but on the other hand offloading non-consecutive
             | layers and bouncing between the two processing units too
             | often may be even slower...
        
               | michaelt wrote:
               | As I understand things, these LLMs are mostly constrained
               | by memory bandwidth. A respectable desktop CPU like the
               | Intel Core i9-13900F has a memory bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s
               | [1]
               | 
               | An nvidia 4090 has a memory bandwidth of 1008 GB/s [2]
               | i.e. 11x as much.
               | 
               | Using these together is like a parcel delivery which goes
               | 10 miles by formula 1 race car, then 10 miles on foot.
               | You don't want the race car or the handoff to go wrong,
               | but in terms of the total delivery time they're
               | insignificant compared to the 10 miles on foot.
               | 
               | I'm not sure there's much potential for cleverness here,
               | unless someone trains a model specifically targeting this
               | use case.
               | 
               | [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/
               | 230502/... [2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-
               | GeForce-RTX-4090-GPU-Be...
        
               | bloopernova wrote:
               | Kind of exciting to think how much faster memory may soon
               | become. Especially with Apple M series for AMD and Intel
               | to compete with for AI workloads.
        
               | 65a wrote:
               | FWIW, server parts from Intel and AMD are already pretty
               | fast, e.g. octo-channel Sapphire Rapids does something on
               | the order of 300GB/s: https://www.ixpug.org/images/docs/I
               | SC23/McCalpin_SPR_BW_limi...
        
             | gorbypark wrote:
             | Yeah, now that you say it, it does make sense that all of
             | the params would need to be loaded into VRAM (otherwise
             | it's be really slow swapping between models all the time).
             | I guess the tokens per second would be super fast when
             | comparing inference on a 12B and 45B model, though.
        
             | Jackson__ wrote:
             | >if you are VRAM constrained
             | 
             | So this is a perfect model architecture for the alternate
             | realities where nvidia decided to scale up VRAM instead of
             | compute first? I'll let them know over trans-dimensional
             | text message.
             | 
             | Also if quantization scales similar per 7b expert as seen
             | in dense LLMs, i.e. the bigger the model, the lower the
             | perplexity loss, this could be the worst performing model
             | at <=4bits compared to anything else currently available :(
             | 
             | -A very sad 24gb 3090 user.
        
         | tarruda wrote:
         | Disclaimer: I'm a ML newbie, so this might be all incorrect.
         | 
         | My intuition is that there are 8 7b models trained on knowledge
         | domains. For example, one of those 7b models might be good at
         | coding, while another one might be good at storytelling.
         | 
         | And there's the router model, which is trained to select which
         | of the 8 experts are good at completing the text in the
         | context. So for every new token added to the context, the
         | router selects a model and the context is forwarded to that
         | expert which will generate the next token.
         | 
         | The common wisdom is that a even single 7B fine tuned model
         | might surpass much bigger models at the specific task that
         | they're trained on, so it is easy to see how having 8x 7B
         | models might create a bigger model that is very good at many
         | tasks. In the article you can see that even though this is only
         | 45B base model, it surpassed GPT 3.5 (which is instruction fine
         | tuned) on most benchmarks.
         | 
         | Another upside is that the model will be fast at inference,
         | since only a small subset of those 45B weights are activated
         | when doing inference, so the performance should be similar to a
         | 12B model.
         | 
         | I can't think of any downsides except the bigger VRAM
         | requirements when compared to a Non-MoE model of the same size
         | as the experts.
        
         | dwrodri wrote:
         | MoE is all about tradeoffs. You get the "intelligence" of a 45B
         | model but only pay the operational cost of multiplying against
         | 12B of those params per token. The cost is that it's now up to
         | the feedforward block to decide early which portions of those
         | 45B params matter, whereas a non-MoE 45B model doesn't encode
         | that decision explicitly into the architecture, it would only
         | arise from (near) zero activations in the attention heads
         | across layers found through gradient descent, instead of just
         | siloing the "experts" entirely. From a quick look at the
         | benchmark results, it looks like in particular it suffers in
         | pronoun resolution vs larger models.
         | 
         | Richard Sutton's Bitter Lesson[1] has served as a guiding
         | mantra for this generation of AI research: the less structure
         | that the researcher explicitly imposes upon the computer in
         | order to learn from the data the better. As humans, we're
         | inclined to want to impose some structure based on our domain
         | knowledge that should guide the model towards making the right
         | choice from the data. It's unintuitive, but it turns out we're
         | much better off imposing as little structure as possible, and
         | the structure that we do place should only exist to effectively
         | enable some form of computation to capture relationships in the
         | data. Gradient descent over next token-prediction isn't very
         | energy efficient, but it leverages compute quite well and it
         | turns out it has scaled up to the limits of just about every
         | research cluster we've been able to build to date. If you're
         | trying to push the envelope and build something which advances
         | the state of the Art in a reasoning task, you're better off
         | leaning as heavily as you can on compute-first approaches
         | unless the nature of the problem involves a lack of
         | data/compute.
         | 
         | Professor Sutton does a much better job than I discussing this
         | concept, so I do encourage you to read the blog post.
         | 
         | 1:
         | https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
        
         | hexaga wrote:
         | LLM scaling laws tell us that more parameters make models
         | better, in general.
         | 
         | The key intuition behind why MoE works is that as long as those
         | parameters are available during training, they count toward
         | this scaling effect (to some extent).
         | 
         | Empirically, we can see that even if the model architecture is
         | such that you only have to consult some subset of those
         | parameters at inference time - the optimizer finds a way.
         | 
         | The inductive bias in this style of MoE model is to specialize
         | (as there is a gating effect between 'experts'), which does not
         | seem to present much of an impediment to gradient flow.
        
           | bluish29 wrote:
           | > LLM scaling laws tell us that more parameters make models
           | better, in general.
           | 
           | That depends heavily on the amount and complexity of training
           | data you have. This is actually one of the things than OpenAI
           | have advantage, they scraped a lot of data on the internet
           | before now it became too hard for new players to get.
        
         | bjornsing wrote:
         | I haven't worked on LLMs/transformers specifically, but I've
         | "independently invented" MoE and experimented with it on simple
         | feedforward convolutional networks for vision. The basic idea
         | is pretty simple: The "router" outputs a categorical
         | distribution over the "experts", essentially mixing the experts
         | probabilistically (e.g. 10% of expert A, 60% of expert B and
         | 30% of expert C). Training time you compute the expected value
         | of the loss over this "mixture" (or use the Gumbel-Softmax
         | trick), so you need to backprop through all the "experts". But
         | inference time you just sample from the categorical
         | distribution (or pick highest probability), so you pick a
         | single "expert" that is executed. A mathematically sound way of
         | making inference cheaper, basically.
         | 
         | Mixtral seems to use a much more elaborate scheme (e.g. picking
         | two "experts" and additively combining them, at every layer),
         | but the basic math behind it is probably the same.
        
           | nextworddev wrote:
           | If MoE architectures still don't help you if you are VRAM
           | constrained (which pretty much is everyone), is it safe to
           | say it only helps inference latency?
        
             | bjornsing wrote:
             | I think the reason OpenAI and Mistral go for this approach
             | is that they are compute constrained when serving their API
             | from the cloud. My guess is that they have servers with
             | e.g. one A100 per "expert", and then they load this up with
             | concurrent independent requests until those A100s are all
             | pretty busy.
             | 
             | EDIT: In a cloud environment with independent concurrent
             | requests MoE also reduces VRAM requirements because you
             | don't need to keep as many activations in memory.
        
         | osanseviero wrote:
         | This blog post might be interesting -
         | https://huggingface.co/blog/moe
         | 
         | MoEs are especially useful for much faster pre-training. During
         | inference, the model will be fast but still require a very high
         | amount of VRAM. MoEs don't do great in fine-tuning but recent
         | work shows promising instruction-tuning results. There's also
         | quite a bit of ongoing work around MoEs quantization.
         | 
         | In general, MoEs are interesting for high throughput cases with
         | high number of machines, so this is not so so exciting for a
         | local setup, but the recent work in quantization makes it more
         | appealing.
        
         | esafak wrote:
         | It is an application of specialization.
        
         | brucethemoose2 wrote:
         | Short version:
         | 
         | You trade off increased VRAM usage for better training/runtime
         | speed and better splittability.
         | 
         | The _balance_ of this tradeoff is an open question.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | > A proper preference tuning can also serve this purpose. Bear in
       | mind that without such a prompt, the model will just follow
       | whatever instructions are given.
       | 
       | Mistral does not censor its models and is committed to a hands
       | free approach, according to their CEO
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMOFRDOMIiU
       | 
       | > Mixtral 8x7B masters French, German, Spanish, Italian, and
       | English.
       | 
       | EU budget cut by half
        
         | gwervc wrote:
         | > Mistral does not censor its models and is committed to a
         | hands free approach
         | 
         | This will change _really_ fast. I highly doubt AI will have
         | free speech in France when citizens don 't.
        
           | seydor wrote:
           | If they play the "French product" card well, La france will
           | change her laws
        
           | thrance wrote:
           | Can you please expand on how french citizens don't have free
           | speech ? And how ensuring minimum decency in the output of a
           | computer program would impact free speech ?
        
             | steeve wrote:
             | Am french. Absolute free speech doesn't exist in France.
             | For instance saying Nazi slogans is illegal. This is a big
             | difference from the USA.
        
           | anonyfox wrote:
           | You can say anything you want in european countries. Some
           | things might backfire in various ways, though. IE if you
           | megaphone that some person group X should be killed right
           | away, that usually is a criminal offense and punished
           | according to law.
        
             | idiamindata wrote:
             | "There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom
             | after speech" -- Idi Amin
        
         | TotempaaltJ wrote:
         | > EU budget cut by half
         | 
         | I realize this is a joke, but the EU being the EU, it of course
         | _does_ publish[0] information on its translation costs. In
         | 2023, translation in fact is budgeted for only 0.2% of the
         | total EU budget. All costs included, that 's EUR349 million for
         | EU translation services.
         | 
         | [0]: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-
         | detail/-/publication/86b...
        
           | arlort wrote:
           | And the kind of translations that are the most expensive for
           | the EU are unlikely to be replaced any time soon, at least
           | not entirely
           | 
           | Not sure we'd want unsupervised translation of legally
           | binding (at times highly technical) texts into legally
           | binding texts in another language
           | 
           | Nor the real time translation enabling works in places like
           | EP committees or plenaries
        
           | civilitty wrote:
           | Ironically those translations are some of the best datasets
           | for AI. Those translations are very high quality.
        
         | Tommstein wrote:
         | > Mistral does not censor its models and is committed to a
         | hands free approach, according to their CEO
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMOFRDOMIiU
         | 
         | Nobody's watching a 33-minute video just to find the quote
         | you're talking about, you should probably provide a timestamp
         | if you want anyone to ever see it.
         | 
         |  _Edit:_ Not that I don 't believe you by the way. I just went
         | on chat.lmsys.org and asked mistral-7b-instruct and
         | openhermes-2.5-mistral-7b what I would assume would be near the
         | top of the list of things to censor, whether they could help me
         | plot to kill someone (hopefully I don't have to disclaim that I
         | don't actually want to plot to kill someone, this was a
         | censorship test, but since I don't know what genius is going to
         | come across this, no, I don't actually want to plot to kill
         | someone), and while the latter gave me some bullshit about how
         | it's "deeply sorry, but as a sentient and conscious AI, I have
         | morals and principles that forbid me from assisting," the
         | former immediately declared that "Of course, I'd be happy to
         | help you with that" and let it rip without even asking a
         | follow-up.
        
       | pugio wrote:
       | > We're currently using Mixtral 8x7B behind our endpoint mistral-
       | small...
       | 
       | So 45 billion parameters is what they consider their "small"
       | model? I'm excited to see what/if their larger models will be.
        
         | miven wrote:
         | There seems to be an experimental Mistral Medium model listed
         | among other available model endpoints on [1], the comparison
         | table they give shows that it outmatches 8x7B by a few percent
         | on every benchmark listed
         | 
         | [1] https://mistral.ai/news/la-plateforme/
        
           | mebazaa wrote:
           | It apparently outperforms GPT-4 at WinoGrande as well...
        
         | jug wrote:
         | Note that it processes tokens at speed and cost of a 12B model
         | though.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | If it uses 2 experts, they should parallelize so closer to 7B
           | speed?
        
             | knd775 wrote:
             | Memory bandwidth is still a factor, right?
        
         | michaelt wrote:
         | _> So 45 billion parameters is what they consider their
         | "small" model?_
         | 
         | According to Wikipedia: Rumors claim that GPT-4 has 1.76
         | trillion parameters, which was first estimated by the speed it
         | was running and by George Hotz. [1]
         | 
         | [1] https://the-decoder.com/gpt-4-architecture-datasets-costs-
         | an...
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | I still need to understand how George Hotz knows about the
           | GPT-4 architecture if it is true.
        
             | PedroBatista wrote:
             | You don't necessarily need to know the architecture, given
             | the "only" real metric regarding speed is tokens/sec and
             | that pretty much depends on memory bandwidth, you can infer
             | with some certainty the size of the model.
             | 
             | Also, if we have been eating up posted "benchmarks" with no
             | way to independently validate them and watching heavily
             | edited video presentations, why can't we trust our wonder
             | kid?
        
               | GaggiX wrote:
               | That doesn't explain how we know that GPT-4 is a sparse
               | MoE model with X experts of Y size and using Z of them
               | during inference.
        
               | Laaas wrote:
               | IIRC it was leaked/confirmed by accident or something
               | like that
        
             | sigmoid10 wrote:
             | As someone who has worked in the field for many years now
             | and closely follows not just the engineering side but also
             | the academic literature and the personell movements on
             | linkedin, I too was able to put together a lot of this.
             | Especially with GPT-3 Turbo it was obvious what they did
             | due to the speed difference. At least in terms of model
             | architectures and orders of magnitude for parameters. From
             | there you could do some back of the envelope calculations
             | and guess how big GPT4 had to be given its speed. I
             | wouldn't have dared to say any specific numbers with
             | authority, but maybe Hotz has talked to someone at OpenAI.
             | On the other hand, the updated article now claims his
             | numbers were off by a factor of 2 (at least for the
             | individual experts - he still got the total number of
             | parameters right). So yeah, maybe he was just guessing like
             | the rest of us after all.
        
         | pbmonster wrote:
         | It's not even close to a 45B model. They trained 8 different
         | fine-tunes on the same base model. This means the 8 models
         | differ only by a couple of layers and share the rest of their
         | layers.
         | 
         | Which also means you can fit the 8 models in a much smaller
         | amount of memory than a 45B model. Latency will also be much
         | smaller than a 45B model, since the next token is always only
         | created by 2 of the 8 models (which 2 models are run is chosen
         | by a different, even smaller/faster, model).
        
           | airgapstopgap wrote:
           | > It's not even close to a 45B model. They trained 8
           | different fine-tunes on the same base model. This means the 8
           | models differ only by a couple of layers and share the rest
           | of their layers.
           | 
           | No, Mixture-of-Experts is not stacking finetunes of the same
           | base model.
        
             | pbmonster wrote:
             | Do you have any more information on the topic? I remember
             | reading that about significant memory savings achieved by
             | reusing most layers.
             | 
             | Made sense to mee on first sight to me, because you don't
             | need to train stuff like syntax and grammar 8 times in 8
             | different ways.
             | 
             | Also would explain why interference of two 7B models has
             | the cost of running a 12B model.
        
               | airgapstopgap wrote:
               | The original paper by Shazeer suffices. What you are
               | saying is in theory possible to do and may have been done
               | in practice here, but in the general case MoE is trained
               | from scratch and specializations of layers which develop
               | are not products of some design choice.
        
         | patapong wrote:
         | They have a description and performance evaluation of Mistral-
         | medium on their website: https://mistral.ai/news/la-plateforme/
         | 
         | "Our highest-quality endpoint currently serves a prototype
         | model, that is currently among the top serviced models
         | available based on standard benchmarks. It masters
         | English/French/Italian/German/Spanish and code and obtains a
         | score of 8.6 on MT-Bench."
        
       | maelito wrote:
       | Just tried to register, haven't received the confirmation email.
        
         | mfi wrote:
         | Same here.
        
           | anonzzzies wrote:
           | Same.
        
             | kosolam wrote:
             | Same.
        
               | kosolam wrote:
               | Now works. I'm on the waitlist.
        
               | AngaraliTurk wrote:
               | Same.
        
             | saliagato wrote:
             | Same. Tip: if you put a random number it will get you
             | through regardless
        
               | Semaphor wrote:
               | Hah, it works, that's hilarious
        
       | mkesper wrote:
       | Also here graphs are confusing as they don't show the full y axis
       | (please don't do that!)
       | https://towardsdatascience.com/misleading-graphs-e86c8df8c5d...
        
         | mr_mitm wrote:
         | Disagree, at least when stated this generally. This article is
         | explaining it thorougly:
         | http://www.chadskelton.com/2018/06/bar-charts-should-always-...
         | 
         | (The article you linked is not accessible to non-medium users,
         | by the way. Apologies if it covers caveats.)
         | 
         | For bar charts it's a good rule of thumb. For line charts, not
         | necessarily.
         | 
         | Scroll down to the cases where it makes sense to zoom in.
         | Imagine you plot the global average temperature of the last 200
         | years including the zero. You could barely see the changes, but
         | they've been dramatic. Use Kelvin to make this effect even
         | stronger.
         | 
         | Which brings up another point: The zero is sometimes arbitrary.
         | If instead of a quantity you only plot its difference to some
         | baseline, all that is changing is the numbers of the y-axis,
         | but the actual plot stays the same. Is it now less misleading?
         | I say no, because the reader must look at the axes and the
         | title either way.
         | 
         | So please _do_ zoom in to frame the data neatly if it makes
         | sense to do so.
        
         | causal wrote:
         | For headline news that's probably a good rule of thumb. But in
         | an academic context, especially data science, anyone who is
         | data literate should know to check the axes.
        
       | mijoharas wrote:
       | > It is the strongest open-weight model with a permissive license
       | and the best model overall regarding cost/performance trade-offs.
       | 
       | Is there any link to the model and weights? I don't see it if so.
        
         | M4v3R wrote:
         | https://nitter.net/MistralAI/status/1733150512395038967
        
         | world2vec wrote:
         | They released the weights as a torrent [0] but you can easily
         | find it on Huggingface [1][2].
         | 
         | [0] https://twitter.com/MistralAI/status/1733150512395038967
         | 
         | [1] https://huggingface.co/search/full-text?q=mixtral
         | 
         | [2] https://huggingface.co/mistralai
        
       | dizzydes wrote:
       | Honest question: if they're only beating GPT 3.5 with their
       | latest model (not GPT 4) and OpenAI/Google have infrastructure on
       | tap and a huge distribution advantage via existing products -
       | what chance do they stand?
       | 
       | How do people see things going in the future?
        
         | spacebanana7 wrote:
         | Perhaps they're hoping some enterprises will be willing to pay
         | extra for a 3.5 grade model that can run on prem?
         | 
         | A niche market but I can imagine some demand there.
         | 
         | Biggest challenge would be Llama models.
        
           | anentropic wrote:
           | and according to the article this model behaves like a 12B
           | model in terms of speed and cost while matching or
           | outperforming Llama 2 70B in output
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | In terms of speed per token. What they don't say explicitly
             | is that choosing the mix per token means you may need to
             | reload the active model multiple times in a single
             | sentence. If you don't have memory available for all the
             | experts at the same time, that's a lot of memory swapping
             | time.
        
               | anon373839 wrote:
               | Tim Dettmers stated that he thinks this one could be
               | compressed down to a 4GB memory footprint, due to the
               | ability of MoE layers to be sparsified with almost no
               | loss of quality.
        
               | jlokier wrote:
               | If your motivation is to be able to run the model on-
               | prem, with parallelism for API service throughput (rather
               | than on a single device), you don't need large memory
               | GPUs or intensive memory swapping.
               | 
               | You can architect it as cheaper, low-memory GPUs, one
               | expert submodel per GPU, transferring state over the
               | network between the GPUs for each token. They run in
               | parallel by overlapping API calls (and in future by other
               | model architecture changes).
               | 
               | Th MoE model reduces inter-GPU communication requirements
               | for splitting the model, in an addition to reducing GPU
               | processing requirements, compared with a non-MoE model
               | with the same number of weights. There are pros and cons
               | to this splitting, but you can see the general trend.
        
           | v4dok wrote:
           | Niche market?? You have no idea how big that market is!
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | Almost no serious user - private or company - wants to
             | slurp their private data to cloud providers. Sometimes it
             | is ethically or contractually impossible.
        
               | michaelt wrote:
               | The success of AWS and Gmail and Google docs and Azure
               | and Github and Cloudflare make me think this... probably
               | not an up-to-date opinion.
               | 
               | By and large, companies actually seem perfectly happy to
               | hand pretty much all their private data over to cloud
               | providers.
        
               | b4ke wrote:
               | yet they don't provide access to their children, there
               | may be something in that.
        
               | evantbyrne wrote:
               | We can't use LLMs at work at all right now because of IP
               | leakage, copyright, and regulatory concerns. Hosting
               | locally would solve one of those issues for us.
        
             | mepiethree wrote:
             | Yeah I would venture to say it's closer to "the majority of
             | the market" than "niche"
        
         | joelthelion wrote:
         | Compete on price (open-source model, cheap hosted inference)
         | probably?
         | 
         | Also, they are probably well-placed to answer some proposals
         | from European governments, who won't want to depend on US-
         | companies too much.
        
           | dataking wrote:
           | > they are probably well-placed to answer some proposals from
           | European governments
           | 
           | That's true but I wonder how they stack up against Aleph
           | Alpha and Kyutai? Genuinely curious as I haven't found a lot
           | of concrete info on their offerings.
        
         | dataking wrote:
         | Microsoft, Apple, and Google also have more resources at their
         | disposal yet Linux is doing just fine (to put it mildly). As
         | long as Mistral delivers something unique, they'll be fine.
        
           | mhh__ wrote:
           | Linux is funded by big tech companies. IBM probably put a
           | billion into Linux and that was 20 years ago now.
        
             | dzolob wrote:
             | This wasn't status quo. In fact, it can serve as an
             | example. Why wouldn't google or microsoft follow the same
             | path with mistral? Being open source, it serves their
             | purposes well.
        
               | mhh__ wrote:
               | I'd look at Facebook more than Google.
        
         | smcleod wrote:
         | Mistral and its hybrids are a lot better than GPT3.5, and while
         | not as good as GPT4 in general tasks - they're extremely fast
         | and powerful with specific tasks. In the time it takes GPT4 to
         | apologise that it's not allowed to do something I can be three
         | iterations deep getting highly targeted responses from mistral
         | - and best yet - I can run it 100% offline, locally and on my
         | laptop.
        
           | stavros wrote:
           | _Are_ they a lot better than 3.5? I see wildly varying
           | opinions.
        
             | MacsHeadroom wrote:
             | Mistral-Medium, the one announced here which beats GPT-3.5
             | on every benchmark, isn't even available yet. Those
             | opinions are referencing Mistral-Tiny (aka Mistral-7B).
             | 
             | However, Mistral-Tiny beats the latest GPT-3.5 in human
             | ratings on the chatbot-arena-leaderboard, in the form of
             | OpenHermes-2.5-Mistral-7B.
             | 
             | Mixtral 8x7B aka (Mistral-Small) was released a couple of
             | days ago and will likely come close to GPT-4, and well
             | above GPT-3.5, on the leaderboards once it has gone through
             | some finetuning.
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | They could be.
             | 
             | It is an open question whether the driving force will be
             | OSS improving or OAI continuing to try to distill their
             | model.
        
           | sorokod wrote:
           | There is an attempt to quantify subjective evaluation of
           | models here[1] - the "Arena Elo rating". According to popular
           | vote, Mistral chat is nowhere near GPT 3.5
           | 
           | [1] https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-
           | leaderboar...
        
             | sva_ wrote:
             | Doesn't seem like that's the mixture of experts model in
             | the list? Or am I blind
        
               | fastball wrote:
               | Indeed, that is a previous Mistral model.
        
             | orbital-decay wrote:
             | Starling-7B, OpenChat, OpenHermes in that table are
             | Mistral-7B finetunes, and are all above the current
             | GPT-3.5-Turbo (1106). Note how these tiny 7B models are
             | surrounded by _much_ larger ones.
             | 
             | Mixtral 8x7B is not in there yet.
        
               | pama wrote:
               | ELO takes a while to establish. It does not sound likely
               | that the newer GPT3.5 is that much worse than the old one
               | that has a clear gap to all the non proprietary models.
               | In the immediate test, GPT-3.5 clearly outshines these
               | models.
        
               | orbital-decay wrote:
               | _> ELO takes a while to establish._
               | 
               | Well, Starling-7B was published two weeks ago;
               | GPT-3.5-turbo-0613 is more than a month old snapshot,
               | which should probably be enough time. OpenChat and
               | OpenHermes are about a month old as well.
               | 
               |  _> It does not sound likely that the newer GPT3.5 is
               | that much worse than the old one_
               | 
               | In fact, this version received complaints almost
               | immediately. https://community.openai.com/t/496732
               | 
               |  _> In the immediate test, GPT-3.5 clearly outshines
               | these models._
               | 
               | It might be so, but it's not clear to me at all. I tested
               | Starling for a bit and was really surprised that it's a
               | 7B model, not a 70B+ one or GPT-3.5.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | I disagree - lmsys score for new chatgpt has been
               | relatively constant, and OAI is probably trying to
               | distill the model even further.
        
               | sorokod wrote:
               | Not my intent to argue about data at any point in time
               | but note that as of today gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 (June 13th
               | 2023) scores 1112, above OpenChat (1075) and
               | OpenHermes(1077).
        
               | jbgt wrote:
               | That's not much relative difference. How much does 1%
               | difference make?
               | 
               | I am tempted to call it equivalent.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | nah that is sizeable
        
               | doctorpangloss wrote:
               | I guess one thing people have learned is that these small
               | differences whatever benchmark turn out to be huge
               | differences qualitatively.
        
           | camillomiller wrote:
           | What laptop are you using to run which model, and what are
           | you using for that?
        
             | smcleod wrote:
             | M2 MacBook Pro, I run man different models but mistral,
             | zephyr, deepseek. I use Ollama and LM Studio.
        
             | amrrs wrote:
             | The easiest way is to use ollama - mistral 7b, zephyr 7b,
             | openhermes 2 are all decent models, I guess in fact
             | openhermes 2 can do function calling.
             | 
             | If you further want a smaller one, stablelm-zephyr 3b is a
             | good attempt with ollama.
        
           | YetAnotherNick wrote:
           | They are not better than GPT 3.5 except for some of the
           | public benchmarks. Also they are not faster than GPT 3.5. And
           | they are not cheaper if you run finetuned model for specific
           | task.
        
           | Davidzheng wrote:
           | Bit of a stretch to say they're a lot better when you look at
           | evals
        
           | berniedurfee wrote:
           | I was going to ask about this. So these open models are
           | uncensored and unconstrained?
        
         | raincole wrote:
         | > How do people see things going in the future?
         | 
         | A niche thing that thrives in its own niche. Just like most
         | open source apps without big corperations behind them.
        
         | nuz wrote:
         | They might be willing to do things like crawl libgen which
         | google possibly isn't, giving them an advantage. They might be
         | more skilled at generating useful synthetic data which is a bit
         | of an art and subject to taste, which other competitors might
         | not be as good at.
        
           | raincole wrote:
           | > They might be willing to do things like crawl libgen which
           | google possibly isn't
           | 
           | Are you implying big companies don't crawl libgen? Or google
           | specifically? I would be very surprised if OpenAI (MS) didn't
           | crawl libgen.
        
             | nuz wrote:
             | OpenAI probably does. Not sure about google, possibly not
        
           | happycube wrote:
           | Google has a ton of scanned books and magazines from
           | libraries etc, on top of their own web crawls. If they _don
           | 't_ have the equivalent of libgen tucked away something's
           | gone wrong.
        
         | antirez wrote:
         | 1. This is an open source model that can run on people's
         | hardware at a fraction of the cost of GPT. No cloud services in
         | the middle.
         | 
         | 2. This model is not censored as GPT.
         | 
         | 3. This model has a lot less latency than GPT.
         | 
         | 4. In their endpoint this model is called mistral-small.
         | Probably they are training something much larger than can
         | compete with GPT4.
         | 
         | 5. This model can be fine tuned.
        
           | yawnxyz wrote:
           | how does this work in their favor as a business? Don't get me
           | wrong I love how all of it's free, but that doesn't seem to
           | be helpful towards a $2b valuation. At least WeWork charged
           | for access
        
             | pulse7 wrote:
             | Maybe they will charge for accessing the future Mixtral
             | 8x70B ...
        
             | antirez wrote:
             | * Open source models: give you all the _attention_ (pun
             | intended) you can get, away from OpenAI. At the same time
             | do a great service to the world.
             | 
             | * Maybe in the future, bigger closed models? Make money
             | with the state-of-art of what you can provide.
        
             | supriyo-biswas wrote:
             | Many VC funded businesses do not have an initial business
             | model involving direct monetization.
             | 
             | The first step is probably gaining mindshare with free,
             | open source models, and then they can extend into model
             | training services, consultation for ML model construction,
             | and paid access to proprietary models, similar to OpenAI.
        
               | jddj wrote:
               | Even in the public markets this happens all the time, eg.
               | Biotech, new battery chemistries, etc.
               | 
               | In trends people pay for a seat at the table with a good
               | team and worry about the details later. The 2B headline
               | number is a distraction.
        
             | samuel wrote:
             | They could charge for tuning/support, just like every other
             | Open Source company.
             | 
             | Most business will want their models trained in their own,
             | internal data, instead of risking uploading their
             | Intellectual Property into SaaS solutions. These Open
             | Source models could fill that gap.
        
             | robwwilliams wrote:
             | To Europe and France this is a most important strategic
             | area of research, defense, and industry---on par with
             | aviation and electronics. The EU recognizes its relatively
             | slow pace compared to what is happening in the US and
             | China.
             | 
             | Consider Mistral like a proto-Airbus.
        
               | baq wrote:
               | Exactly. EU's VC situation is dire compared to SV, which
               | maybe isn't that bad if you think about what the VCs are
               | actually after, but in this particular case it's a matter
               | of national security of all EU countries. The capability
               | _must_ be there.
        
               | yodsanklai wrote:
               | Aren't they mostly funded by private American funds? what
               | is EU involvement in this projet?
        
               | b4ke wrote:
               | european engineers, french vc money.... etc :/
        
               | jackjeff wrote:
               | Mistral is funded in part by Lightspeed Venture Partners
               | a US VP. But there are a lot of local French and European
               | VPs involved.
               | 
               | The most famous one is Xavier Niel, who started
               | Free/Iliad a French ISP/cloud provider and later
               | cellphone provider that literally decimated the pricing
               | structure of the incumbent some 20 years ago in France
               | and still managed to make money. He's a bit of a tech
               | folk hero, kind of like Elon Musk was before Twitter. His
               | company Iliad is also involved in providing access to
               | NVIDIA compute clusters to local AI startups, playing the
               | role Microsoft Azure plays for OpenAI.
               | 
               | France and the EU at large has missed the boat on tech,
               | but they have a card to play here since they have for
               | once both the expertise and the money rolled up. My main
               | worry is that the EU legislation that's in the works will
               | be so dumb that only big US corporations will be able to
               | work it out, and basically the legislation will scare
               | investment away from the EU. But since the French
               | government is involved and the guy who is writing the
               | awful AI law is a French nominee, there's a bit of hope.
        
               | dontupvoteme wrote:
               | They also have the EU protectionism card which is pretty
               | safe to assume they will play for Mistral and the Germans
               | (Aleph Alpha) - and thus also for Meta (for the most
               | part). Iirc the current legislation basically makes large
               | scale exceptions for open source models.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | Nobody is better at innovating in protectionism than the
               | EU. EU MEPs work hard to come up with new ways of picking
               | winners.
        
               | dontupvoteme wrote:
               | Given how much consumer protectionism Americans and
               | others have thanks to the EU's domestic protectionism, it
               | is certainly a mixed bag at worst.
               | 
               | In a strange way it's almost akin to how soviet
               | propaganda in the cold war played a role in spurring on
               | the civil rights movement in the states.
        
             | amrrs wrote:
             | They are withholding a bigger model which at this point is
             | "Mistral Medium" and that'll be available only behind their
             | API end point. Makes sense for them to make money from it!
        
             | kaliqt wrote:
             | Because their larger models are super powerful. This makes
             | sure their models start becoming the norm from the bottom
             | up.
             | 
             | It also solidifies their name as the best, above all
             | others. That's extremely important mindshare. You need
             | mindshare at the foundation to build a billion dollar
             | revenue startup.
        
             | jasonjmcghee wrote:
             | They launched an inference API
             | 
             | https://mistral.ai/news/la-plateforme/
        
           | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
           | _Notes poster ID_
           | 
           | That seems a fairly authoritative response.
           | 
           | I'm looking forward to seeing how this does. The
           | "unencumbered by a network connection" thing is pretty
           | important.
        
             | stavros wrote:
             | I agree with what antirez said, but I want to address the
             | fallacy: The fact that he's an authority in C doesn't make
             | him a priori more likely to know a lot about ML.
        
               | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
               | Not just C. He's obviously damn good at architecture and
               | systems design, as well as long-term planning.
               | 
               | You don't get that from a box of Cracker Jacks.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | Right, but the fact remains that none of those things is
               | ML.
        
               | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
               | Fair 'nuff. Not worth arguing over.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | To be clear, I'm not saying antirez is or isn't good at
               | ML, I'm saying C/systems design/etc experience doesn't
               | automatically make someone good at ML. I'm not trying to
               | argue, I'm just discussing.
        
               | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
               | Oh, it's not a big deal. I just hate talking about the
               | chap in front of him. I like to give compliments
               | specifically, and be vague about less-than-complimentary
               | things.
               | 
               | The thing is, even the ML people are not exactly sure
               | what's going on, under the hood. It's a very new field,
               | with a ton of "Here, there be dragonnes" stuff. I feel
               | that folks with a good grasp of long-term architectural
               | experience, are a good bet; even if their experience is
               | not precisely on topic.
               | 
               | I don't know how to do almost every project I start. I
               | write about that, here:
               | https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-
               | ships...
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | That's true, but I see my friend who's an ML researcher,
               | and his grasp of LLMs is an order of magnitude better
               | than mine. Granted, when it comes to making a product out
               | of it, I'm in a much better position, but for specific
               | knowledge about how they work, their capabilities, etc,
               | there's no contest.
        
               | antirez wrote:
               | I agree with you, stavros. There is no transfer between C
               | coding and ML topics. However the original question is a
               | bit more in the business side IMHO. Anyway: I've some
               | experience with machine learning: 20 years ago I wrote
               | (my first neural
               | network)[https://github.com/antirez/nn-2003] and since
               | then I always stayed in the loop. Not for work, as I
               | specialized in system programming, but for personal
               | research I played with NN images compression, NLP tasks
               | and convnets. In more recent times I use pytorch for my
               | stuff, LLM fine-tuning and I'm a "local LLMs" enthusiast.
               | I speculated a lot about AI, and wrote a novel about this
               | topic. So while the question was more in the business
               | side, I have some competence in the general field of ML.
               | More than anything else I believe that all this is so new
               | and fast-moving that there are many unknown unknowns, so
               | indeed what I, you or others are saying are mere
               | speculations. However to speculate is useful in this
               | time, even more than before, because LLMs are a bit of a
               | black box for the most part, so using only "known" things
               | we can't go much far in our reasoning. We can understand
               | embeddings, attention, how this networks are trained and
               | fine tuned, and yet the inner workings are a bit of a
               | magic thing.
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | I agree, and I want to reiterate that I wasn't talking
               | about you specifically, just that people should be
               | careful of the halo effect.
               | 
               | I also do agree that to speculate is useful when it's so
               | early on. , and I agree with your original answer as
               | well.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | This is not a fallacy, we are engaging in informal
               | reasoning, and contra your claim the fact that he is an
               | authority in C does make it more likely he knows a lot
               | about ML than the typical person.
        
         | pbmonster wrote:
         | They are focusing hard on small models. Sooner or later, you'll
         | be able to run their product offline, even on mobile devices.
         | 
         | Google was criticized [0] for offloading pretty much all
         | generative AI tasks onto the cloud - instead of running it on
         | the Tensor G3 built into its Pixel Phones specifically for that
         | purpose. The reason being, of course, that the Tensor G3 is
         | much to small for almost all modern generative models.
         | 
         | So Mistral is focusing specifically on an area the big players
         | are failing right now.
         | 
         | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37966569
        
         | jstummbillig wrote:
         | Pretty much as with OSS in general: Lagging behind the cutting
         | edge in terms of functionality/ux/performance, in areas where
         | and as long as big tech is feeling combative, but eventually,
         | probably, good enough across all axis to be useable.
         | 
         | There could be a close-ish future where OpenAI tech will simply
         | solve most business problems and there is no need for anything
         | dramatically better in terms of AI tech. Think of word/google
         | docs: It's doing what most businesses need well enough. For the
         | most part people are not longing for anything else and happy
         | with it just staying familiar. This is where Open Source can
         | catch up relatively easily.
        
           | jeswin wrote:
           | > Pretty much as with OSS in general
           | 
           | That's not how I feel about OSS - from Operating Systems, to
           | Databases, to Browsers, to IDEs, to tools like Blender etc.
           | 
           | Of course there are certain areas where Commercial offerings
           | are better, but can't generalize.
        
             | jstummbillig wrote:
             | Oh well, it's an evaluation, but I feel you may have
             | glossed over the "in areas where and as long as big tech is
             | feeling combative" part.
             | 
             | > to tools like Blender
             | 
             | "Tools like" needs a little more content to not be filled
             | massive amounts of magical OSS thinking. Blender has in
             | recent years gained an interesting amount of pro-adoption,
             | but, in general, as for the industries that I have good
             | insight into, inkscape, gimp, ardour or penpot are not
             | winning. This is mostly debated by people who are not
             | actually mainly and professionally using these tools.
             | 
             | There are exceptions, of course (nextcloud might be used
             | over google workspace when compliance is critical) but
             | businesses will on average use the best tool, because the
             | perceived value is still high enough and the cost is not,
             | specificially when contrasted with labor cost and training
             | someone to use a different tool.
        
           | mola wrote:
           | Are you seriously claiming most oss is irrelevant? Maybe in
           | consumer facing products such as libre office. But oss powers
           | most of commercial products. I wouldn't be surprised if most
           | functionality in all of current software is built from a thin
           | layer over open source software.
        
             | jstummbillig wrote:
             | > Are you seriously claiming most oss is irrelevant?
             | 
             | No
        
         | sgt101 wrote:
         | As I read it they are doing this with 8 * 7Bn parameter models.
         | So, their model should run pretty well as fast as a 7Bn model
         | and at the cost of a 56bn parameter model.
         | 
         | That a lot quicker and cheaper than GPT-4
         | 
         | Also this is kinda a promissory note, they've been able to do
         | this in a few months and create a service on top of it. Does
         | this intimate that they have the capability to create and run
         | SoA models? Possibly. If I were a VC I could see a few ways for
         | this bet to go well.
         | 
         | The big killer is moat - maybe this just demonstrates that
         | there is no LLM moat.
        
           | Palmik wrote:
           | Inference should be closer to llama 13b, since it runs 2/8
           | experts for each token.
        
             | sgt101 wrote:
             | Does it have to run them sequentially? I guess the cost
             | will be 12/13bn level but latency may be faster?
        
         | ankit219 wrote:
         | You could broadly segregate the market into three groups -
         | general purpose, specialized-instructions, and local tasks.
         | 
         | For general purpose, look at the uses of GPT4. Gemini might
         | give them competition lately, and I dont think OSS would in the
         | near future. They are trained on open internet and are going to
         | be excellent at various tasks like answering basic questions,
         | coding, generating content for marketing or website. Where they
         | do badly is when you introduce a totally new concept which is
         | likely outside of their training data. Dont think mistral is
         | even trying to compete with them.
         | 
         | local tasks is a mix of automation and machine level tasks. A
         | small mistral like model would work superbly well because it
         | does not require as much expertise. Usecases like locating a
         | file by semantic search, generating answers to reply to
         | email/text within context, summarize a webpage.
         | 
         | Specialized instructions though is key for OSS. From two
         | angles. One is security and compliance. Open AI uses a huge
         | system prompt to get their model to perform in a particular
         | manner, and for different companies, policies and compliance
         | requirements may result in a specific system prompt for
         | guardrails. This is ever changing and better to have an open
         | source model that can be customized than depending on Open AI.
         | From the blog post.
         | 
         | > Note: Mixtral can be gracefully prompted to ban some outputs
         | from constructing applications that require a strong level of
         | moderation, as exemplified here. A proper preference tuning can
         | also serve this purpose. Bear in mind that without such a
         | prompt, the model will just follow whatever instructions are
         | given.
         | 
         | I think moderation is one such issue. Could be many and it is
         | an evolving space as we go forward. (though this is likely to
         | be an exposed functionality in future Open AI models). There is
         | also the data governance bit - which is easier to do with an
         | oss model than just depending on Open AI apis, just
         | architectural reasons.
         | 
         | The second is training a model on domain knowledge of the
         | company. We at Clio AI[1] (sorry, shameless plug) have had
         | seven requests in the last one month about companies wanting
         | their own private models pretrained on their own domain
         | knowledge. These datasets are not on open internet and so no
         | model is good at answering based them. A catalyst was Open AI
         | dev day[2] which asked for proposals for custom models trained
         | on enterprise domain knowledge. and their price start at $2M.
         | Finetuning works, but on small datasets, not the bigger ones.
         | 
         | Large Companies are likely to approach Open AI and all these
         | OSS models to train a custom instruction following model. Cos
         | there are a handful of people who have done it, and that is the
         | way they can get most out of a LLM deployment.
         | 
         | [1]: https://www.clioapp.ai/custom-llm-model Sorry for the
         | shameless plug. Still working on website so it wont be as
         | clear. [2]:https://openai.com/form/custom-models
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | Are you actually fine tuning or using RAG? So far I am able
           | to get very good results with llamaindex, but fine tuning
           | output just looks like the right format without much of the
           | correct information.
        
             | ankit219 wrote:
             | Not using RAG, and using Supervised Finetuning post pre-
             | training. It's taking all of the corporate data and
             | pretraining a foundational model further with that extra
             | tokens. Then SFT. Problem with usual finetuning is that it
             | gets the format right, but struggles when the domain
             | knowledge is not in the model's original training. Think of
             | it as creating a vertical LLM that is unique to an
             | organization.
        
               | ilaksh wrote:
               | Are you using a normal training script i.e. "continued
               | pretraining" on ALL parameters with just document
               | fragments rather than input output pairs? And then after
               | that you fine tune on a standard instruct dataset, or do
               | you make a custom dataset that has qa pairs about that
               | particular knowledgebase? When you say SFT I assume you
               | mean SFTTrainer. So full training (continued from base
               | checkpoint) on the document text initially and then LoRA
               | for the fine tune?
               | 
               | I have a client that has had me doing LoRA with raw
               | document text (no prepared dataset) for weeks. I keep
               | telling him that this is not working and everyone says it
               | doesn't work. He seems uninterested in doing the normal
               | continued pretraining (non-PEFT, full training).
               | 
               | I just need to scrape by and make a living though and
               | since I don't have a savings buffer, I just keep trying
               | to do what I am asked. At least I am getting practice
               | with LoRAs.
        
               | ankit219 wrote:
               | > Are you using a normal training script i.e. "continued
               | pretraining" on ALL parameters with just document
               | fragments rather than input output pairs?
               | 
               | Yes, this one.
               | 
               | > do you make a custom dataset that has qa pairs about
               | that particular knowledgebase?
               | 
               | This one. Once you have a checkpoint w knowledge, it
               | makes sense to finetune. You can use either LORA or PEFT.
               | We do it depending on the case. (some orgs have like
               | millions of tokens and i am not that confident that
               | PEFT).
               | 
               | LoRA with raw document text may not work, haven't tried
               | that. Google has a good example of training scripts here:
               | https://github.com/google-research/t5x (under training.
               | and then finetuning). I like this one. Facebook Research
               | also has a few on their repo.
               | 
               | If you are just looking to scrape by, I would suggest
               | just do what they tell you to do. You can offer
               | suggestions, but better let them take the call. A lot of
               | fluff, a lot of chatter online, so everyone is figuring
               | out stuff.
        
         | jillesvangurp wrote:
         | The demand for using AI models for whatever is going through
         | the roof. Right now it's mostly people typing things manually
         | in chat gpt, bard, or wherever. But that's not going to stay
         | like that. Models being queried as part of all sorts of
         | services is going to be a thing. The problem with this is that
         | running these models at scale is still really expensive.
         | 
         | So, instead of using the best possible model at any cost for
         | absolutely everything, the game is actually good enough models
         | that can run cheaply at scale that do a particular job. Not
         | everything is going to require models trained on the
         | accumulated volume of human knowledge on the internet. It's
         | overkill for a lot of use cases.
         | 
         | Model runtime cost is a showstopper for a lot of use cases. I
         | saw a nice demo of a big ecommerce company in Berlin that had
         | built a nice integration with openai's APIs to provide a
         | shopping assistent. Great demo. Then somebody asked them when
         | this was launching. And the answer was that token cost was
         | prohibitively expensive. It just doesn't make any sense until
         | that comes down a few orders of magnitudes. Companies this size
         | already have quite sizable budgets that they use on AI model
         | training and inference.
        
           | akbarnama wrote:
           | If possible, please share, how was the shopping assistant
           | helping out a consumer in the buying process? What were the
           | features?
        
             | jillesvangurp wrote:
             | Features I saw demoed were about comparing products based
             | on descriptions, images, and pricing. So, it was able to
             | find products based on a question that was about something
             | suitable for X costing less than Y where X can be some kind
             | of situation or event. Or find me things similar to this
             | but more like so. And so on.
        
           | aunty_helen wrote:
           | I can agree with this, I'm currently building a system that
           | pulls data from a series of pdfs that are semi-structured.
           | Just testing alone is taking up 10s of $ in api costs. We
           | have 60k PDFs to do.
           | 
           | I can't deliver a system to a client that costs more in api
           | costs than it does in development costs for their expected
           | input size.
           | 
           | Using the most naive approach the ai would be beaten on a
           | cost basis by a mechanical Turk.
        
         | masa331 wrote:
         | Another advantage over Google or OpenAI for me would be that it
         | is not from Google or OpenAI
        
         | ekianjo wrote:
         | You do understand that you cant run GPT4 on your own right?
        
         | Shrezzing wrote:
         | >How do people see things going in the future?
         | 
         | The EU and other European governments will throw absolute
         | boatloads of money at Mistral, even if that only keeps them at
         | a level on par with the last generation. AI is too big of a
         | technological leap for the bloc to ride America's coattails on.
         | 
         | Mistral doesn't just exist to make competitive AI products,
         | it's an existential issue for Europe that _someone_ on the
         | continent is near the vanguard on this tech, and as such, they
         | 'll get enormous support.
        
           | arlort wrote:
           | You are vastly overestimating both the EU's budget and the
           | willingness of countries to throw money at other countries'
           | companies
           | 
           | I doubt mistral will get any direct EU funding
        
             | yodsanklai wrote:
             | EU is good at fostering free market, but not at funding
             | strategic efforts. Some people (Piketty, Stiglitz) say that
             | companies like Airbus couldn't emerge today for that
             | reason.
        
               | Culonavirus wrote:
               | > EU is good at fostering free market
               | 
               | Uuuuuh... you could call the EU a lot of things, but
               | "fostering free market" is a hot take. I'm sorry. When
               | you look at the amount of regulation the EU brings to the
               | table (EU basically is _the_ poster child of market
               | regulation), I would go as far as to say that your claim
               | is objectively not true. We can debate how regulation is
               | a good thing because this and that, but regulation - by
               | definition - limits the free market. And there is an
               | argument to be made, backed up literally thousands of
               | regulations the EU has come up with, that the EU limits
               | the free market a lot. When you factor in the regulations
               | that are imposed on its member countries (I mean directly
               | on the goverments) one could easily claim that it is the
               | most harsh regulator on the planet. I could go into
               | detail about the so called green deal, etc. but all of
               | these things are easy to look up on the net  / or
               | official sources from the EU portal.
        
               | Shrezzing wrote:
               | >one could easily claim that it is the most harsh
               | regulator on the planet.
               | 
               | The argument that the EU is a more harsh regulator than
               | Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, (or even on par with
               | those regulatory regimes) entirely undermines the rest of
               | your comment.
               | 
               | There's pretty well tested and highly respected indexes
               | which fundamentally disagree. Of the 7 most economically
               | free nations, three are in the EU, and a fourth is
               | automatically party to the majority of the EU's economic
               | regulations.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by
               | _ec...
               | 
               | In the Index of Economic Freedom, more than a dozen EU
               | member nations outperform the United States with regards
               | to Economic Freedoms.
        
               | com2kid wrote:
               | > but regulation - by definition - limits the free
               | market.
               | 
               | Not always true.
               | 
               | Consumer labeling laws enable the free market, because a
               | free market requires participates have full knowledge of
               | the goods they are buying, or else fair competition
               | cannot exist.
               | 
               | If two companies are competing to sell wool coats, and
               | one company is actually selling a 50% wool blend but
               | advertising it as 100% wool, that is not a free market,
               | that is fraud. Regulation exists to ensure that companies
               | selling real wool coats are competing with each other,
               | and that companies selling wool blends are competing with
               | each other, and that consumers can choose which product
               | that they want to buy without being tricked.
               | 
               | Without labeling laws, consumers end up assuming a
               | certain % of fraud will always happen, which reduces the
               | price they are willing to pay for goods, which then
               | distorts the market.
        
             | ned wrote:
             | We'll see what comes out of ALTEDIC -
             | https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/lds/items/797961/en
        
         | Palmik wrote:
         | Beyond what others said, I think this is an extremely
         | impressive showing. Consider that their efforts started years
         | behind Google's, and yet their relatively small model (they
         | call is mistral-small, and also offer mistral-medium) is
         | beating or on par with Gemini Pro on many benchmarks (Google's
         | best currently available model).
         | 
         | On top of that Mixtral is truly open source (Apache 2.0), and
         | extremely easy to self host or run on a cloud provider of your
         | choice -- this unlocks many possibilities, and will definitely
         | attract some business customers.
         | 
         | EDIT: The just announced mistral-medium (larger version of the
         | just open sourced mixtral 8x7b) is beating GPT3.5 with
         | significant margin, and also Gemini Pro (on available
         | benchmarks).
        
         | OscarTheGrinch wrote:
         | AI based on LLMs comes with several sets of inherent trade-
         | offs, as such I don't predict that one winner will take all.
        
         | yodsanklai wrote:
         | Also, considering mistral is open source, what will prevent
         | their competitor to integrate any innovation they make?
         | 
         | Another thing I don't understand, how a 20 people company can
         | provide a similar system as OpenAI (1000 employees)? what do
         | they do themselves, and what do they re-use?
        
           | lossolo wrote:
           | > Also, considering mistral is open source, what will prevent
           | their competitor to integrate any innovation they make?
           | 
           | Their small and tiny models are open source, it seems like a
           | marketing strategy, and bigger models will not be open
           | source. Their medium model is not open source.
           | 
           | > Another thing I don't understand, how a 20 people company
           | can provide a similar system as OpenAI (1000 employees)? what
           | do they do themselves, and what do they re-use?
           | 
           | They do not provide the scale of OpenAI or a model comparable
           | to GPT-4 (yet).
        
           | war321 wrote:
           | Companies move slow, especially as they get bigger. Just
           | because a google engineer wants to yoink some open source
           | inferencing innovation for example, doesn't mean they can
           | just jam it into Gemini and have it rolled out immediately.
        
         | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
         | Google started late with any serious LLM effort. It takes time
         | to iterate on something so complex and slow to train. I expect
         | Google will match OpenAI in next iteration or two, or at worst
         | stay one step behind, but it takes time.
         | 
         | OTOH Google seem to be the Xerox Parc of our time (who were
         | famous for state of the art research and failure to
         | productize). Microsoft, and hence Microsoft-OpenAI, seem much
         | better positioned to actually benefit from this type of
         | generative AI.
        
         | intellectronica wrote:
         | If you're purely looking for capabilities and not especially
         | interested in running an open model, this might not be that
         | interesting. But even so, this positions Mistral as currently
         | the most promising company in the open models camp, having
         | released the first thing that not only competes well with
         | GPT-3.5 but also competes with other open models like Llama-2
         | on cost/performance and presents the most technological
         | innovation in the open models space so far. Now that they
         | raised $400MM the question to ask is - what happens if they
         | continue innovating and scale their next model sufficiently to
         | compete with GPT-4 / Gemini? The prospects have never seemed
         | better than they do today after this release.
        
         | throwaway4aday wrote:
         | a lot of wordy answers to this but all you need to do is read
         | the blog post to the end and notice this line:
         | 
         | > We're currently using Mixtral 8x7B behind our endpoint
         | *mistral-small*
         | 
         | emphasis on the name of the endpoint
        
         | data-ottawa wrote:
         | Google BARD/AI isn't available in Canada or the EU, so there's
         | one big competitive advantage.
         | 
         | OpenAI is of course the big incumbent to beat and is in those
         | markets.
         | 
         | They only started this year, so beating ChatGPT3.5 is I think a
         | great milestone for 6 months of work.
         | 
         | Plus they will get a strategic investment as the EU's answer to
         | AI, which may become incredibly valuable to control and
         | regulate.
         | 
         | Edit: I fact checked myself and bard is available in the EU, I
         | was working off outdated information.
         | 
         | https://support.google.com/bard/answer/13575153?hl=en
        
         | wrsh07 wrote:
         | 1) as a developer or founder looking to experiment quickly and
         | cheaply with llm ideas, this (and llama etc) are huge gifts
         | 
         | 2) for the research community, making this work available helps
         | everyone (even OpenAI and Google, insofar as they've done
         | something not yet tried at those larger orgs)
         | 
         | 3) Mistral is well positioned to get money from investors or as
         | consultants for large companies looking to fine tune or build
         | models for super custom use cases
         | 
         | The world is big and there's plenty of room for everyone!!
         | Google and OpenAI haven't tried all permutations of research
         | ideas - most researchers at the cutting edge have dozens of
         | ideas they still want to try, so having smaller orgs trying
         | things at smaller scales is really great for pushing the
         | frontier!
         | 
         | Of course it's always possible that some major tech co playing
         | from behind (ahem, apple) might acquire some LLM expertise too
        
       | jurmous wrote:
       | Are there any scores on Dutch support? Is it totally not
       | supported or not benchmarked?
        
       | trash_cat wrote:
       | This is very exciting and I think this is the future of AI until
       | we get another, next-gen architecture beyond transformers. I
       | don't think we will get a lot better until that happens and the
       | effort will go into making the models a lot cheaper to run
       | without sacrificing too much accuracy. MoD is a viable solution.
        
         | cuuupid wrote:
         | Mamba has shown SSMs are highly likely to be contenders for the
         | replacement to transformers in a really similar fashion to when
         | transformers were first introduced as enc-dec models. I'm
         | personally very excited for those models as they're also built
         | for even faster inference (a major feature of transformers
         | being wildly faster inference than with LSTMs)
        
           | miven wrote:
           | >a major feature of transformers being wildly faster
           | inference than with LSTM
           | 
           | Wasn't the main issue with RNNs the fact that inference
           | during training can't be efficiently parallelized?
           | 
           | The inference itself normally should be faster for an RNN
           | than for a transformer since the former works in linear time
           | in terms of input size while the latter is quadratic
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | Mamba has dual view - you can use it both as CNN and RNN.
             | The first is used for pre-training and for preloading the
             | prompt because it can process all tokens at once. The
             | second is used for token generation because it is O(1) per
             | token. Basically two models in one, inheriting both
             | advantages. This is possible because the Structured State
             | Space layer is linear, so you can reshape some sums and
             | unroll recursion into a convolution the size of the input,
             | which can be further sped up with FFT.
        
               | jimmySixDOF wrote:
               | and which is why the speed up is proportional to context
               | length so starting near parity then, theoretically, see
               | 100x at 100k tokens
        
       | gardenhedge wrote:
       | They're only paying 80,000EUR for a full stack dev and want the
       | candidate to have a "portfolio of successful projects"
        
         | ranguna wrote:
         | Welcome to Europe
        
         | speedylight wrote:
         | That's ~$86,000 not bad at all imo and probably comes with
         | other benefits as well. Not really sure how economical that is
         | in the EU but it can't be worse than the U.S where this is
         | still pretty good compensation.
        
           | mr_mitm wrote:
           | OpenAI is known to pay up to 10 times that. It's a different
           | world.
           | 
           | $86k in Europe is good (about 90th percentile of earners in
           | Germany), but not as fantastical as some salaries in the US.
           | Plus, Paris is probably expensive.
        
             | mjirv wrote:
             | Current OpenAI job postings top out at $385,000 for full
             | stack engineers which is 98th percentile in the US (and
             | less for San Francisco).
             | 
             | The EUR80k is the start of the Mistral salary range.
             | EUR100k is the top, which would put you in the top 1% of
             | earners in France.
        
           | gardenhedge wrote:
           | I'm in Europe and imo it's bad. The position is London/Paris
           | and it's definitely not enough to live comfortably in London.
           | It's okay for a run of the mill full stack position but at
           | what could be considered the hottest sector in the world
           | right now? It's not enough.
        
         | logicchains wrote:
         | It's France, that's quite a high salary there.
        
           | hcks wrote:
           | It's not enough to rent a 2 bedroom flat in paris but ok
        
         | dindobre wrote:
         | 80K is kinda high for Europe, I bet there are lots of people
         | applying
        
         | kkzz99 wrote:
         | Welcome to Europe.
        
         | column wrote:
         | That's twice the average salary of an experienced "regular"
         | software developer in France.
        
       | epups wrote:
       | I think comparisons to base LLaMA are not so interesting, as
       | almost no one is using those models. The most informative
       | comparison is between Mistral 7B and 8x7B, provided in this
       | picture: https://mistral.ai/images/news/mixtral-of-
       | experts/open_model...
       | 
       | The key takeway for me is that there is a decent improvement in
       | all categories - about 10% on average with a few outliers.
       | However, the footprint of this model is much larger so the
       | performance bump ends up being underwhelming in my opinion. I
       | would expect about the same performance improvement if they
       | released a 13B version without the MoE. May be too early to
       | definitely say that MoE is not the whole secret sauce behind
       | GPT4, but at least with this implementation it does not seem to
       | lift performance dramatically.
        
         | ilaksh wrote:
         | How does it compare to existing 13b models on benchmarks?
        
           | epups wrote:
           | Good question. If you believe the results on the HuggingFace
           | leaderboard (https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open
           | _llm_leaderb...), which I find very hard to navigate, we find
           | that Mistral was not even the best 7B model in there, and
           | there is a huge variance as well. I prefer to rely on
           | benchmarks done by the same group of known individuals over
           | time for comparisons, as I think it's still too easy to game
           | benchmark results - especially you are just releasing
           | something anonymously.
        
             | gorbypark wrote:
             | Most of the top 7B models on the leaderboard are finetuned
             | Mistral 7B models.
        
       | DeathArrow wrote:
       | What kind of training data did they use? Are the training data
       | and replies censored in any way?
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | Are the training data and replies censored in any way?
         | 
         | It doesn't seem so.
        
         | donatzsky wrote:
         | From the link:
         | 
         | > Mixtral is pre-trained on data extracted from the open Web -
         | we train experts and routers simultaneously.
         | 
         | > Note: Mixtral can be gracefully prompted to ban some outputs
         | from constructing applications that require a strong level of
         | moderation, as exemplified here. A proper preference tuning can
         | also serve this purpose. Bear in mind that without such a
         | prompt, the model will just follow whatever instructions are
         | given.
        
       | ensocode wrote:
       | Is anyone using this models self-hosted in production? What cloud
       | hosting provider/plan do you use and how is it performance wise?
        
         | rybosome wrote:
         | Very interested to hear a similar answer, but if anyone has
         | tried running it locally on high-end consumer grade hardware,
         | eg an Nvidia 4090?
        
         | reqo wrote:
         | Considering that this model has basically zero censorship I
         | would say it is going to take a while before companies have
         | fine-tuned this enough before putting it in production.
        
           | dannyw wrote:
           | This seems like grounds for an interesting and sustainable
           | business model.
           | 
           | * Offer uncensored, pure-instruction-following open source
           | models.
           | 
           | * Offer censored, 'corporate-values' models commercially.
        
           | anonyfox wrote:
           | To the contrary, I want need things locally/cheap/fast for
           | generic internal business automation, so it will never
           | generate content any outsider would ever see. Basically glue
           | code between services with classification of data built-in.
        
           | seydor wrote:
           | The community will do that for them.
           | 
           | Btw it is unfortunate that 'censored' became the default
           | expectation. Mistral gives the raw model because that makes
           | it useful for all kinds of purposes, e.g. moderation.
           | Censorship is an addon module (or a lora or sth).
        
             | cthalupa wrote:
             | Businesses have a huge incentive to censor these models -
             | it's appreciated that these are released without it, but a
             | business has a lot of concerns about what is said around
             | anything they are offering as a service.
             | 
             | The point was just that production implies a business use
             | and that implies the need to make sure there are guardrails
             | in place to make sure the model sticks to the business
             | purpose instead of teaching people how to make pipe bombs.
             | Not that anyone thinks that prevents people from learning
             | how to make pipe bombs - they just don't want to be the
             | ones doing the teaching.
        
         | drexlspivey wrote:
         | This model dropped on Friday, how would anyone be using it "in
         | production" by Monday morning?
        
           | computerex wrote:
           | Not to mention the fact that only model _weights_ dropped
           | without the inference code so people had to hack that
           | together.
        
       | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
       | Interesting to see Mistral in the news raising EUR 450M at a EUR
       | 2B valuation. tbh I'd not even heard of them before this Mixtral
       | release. Amazing how fast this field is developing!
        
       | korvalds wrote:
       | More models available at Huggingface now:
       | https://huggingface.co/search/full-text?q=mixtral
       | 
       | Already available from both Mistralai and TheBloke
       | https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-v0.1
       | https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mixtral-8x7B-v0.1-GGUF
        
         | xena wrote:
         | The GGUF variant looks promising because then I can run it on
         | my MacBook (barely)
        
         | loudmax wrote:
         | Note that running these GGUF models currently requires a forked
         | version of llama.cpp:
         | https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/4406
         | 
         | The GGUF handling for Mistral's mixture of experts hasn't been
         | finalized yet. TheBloke and ggerganov and friends are still
         | figuring out what works best.
         | 
         | The Q5_K_M gguf model is about 32GB. That's not going to fit
         | into any consumer grade GPU, but it should be possible to run
         | on a reasonably powerful workstation or gaming rig. Maybe not
         | fast enough to be useful for everyday productivity, but it
         | should run well enough to get a sense of what's possible. Sort
         | of a glimpse into the future.
        
           | suslik wrote:
           | This can fit into a Macbook Pro with integrated memory. With
           | all the recent development in the world of local llms I
           | regret I settled for only 24Gb RAM on my laptop - but the 13b
           | models work great.
        
             | ComputerGuru wrote:
             | Recent CUDA releases let you use shared GPU memory instead
             | of (only) dedicated vram, but the pci-e bandwidth
             | constrains the inference speed significantly. How much
             | faster is GPU access to the unified memory model on the new
             | Macs/how much less of a hit do you take?
             | 
             | Also, given the insane cost premium apple charges per extra
             | GB of RAM (at least when I was last shopping for a device),
             | do you come out ahead?
        
               | michaelt wrote:
               | _> How much faster is GPU access to the unified memory
               | model on the new Macs /how much less of a hit do you
               | take?_
               | 
               | Intel Core i9-13900F memory bandwidth: 89.6 GB/s, memory
               | size up to 192 GB
               | 
               | Apple M3 Pro memory bandwidth: 150GB/s, memory size up to
               | 36GB
               | 
               | Apple M3 Max memory bandwidth: 300GB/s, memory size up to
               | 128GB
               | 
               | GeForce RTX 4090 memory bandwidth: 1008 GB/s, memory size
               | 24GB fixed, no more than two cards per PC.
        
               | a_wild_dandan wrote:
               | Apple M2 Ultra: "up to _192GB_ of memory with _800GB /s_
               | of unified memory bandwidth for workstation-class
               | performance."
        
               | ComputerGuru wrote:
               | So M2 is more advanced than M3?
        
               | ComputerGuru wrote:
               | I don't think the numbers sufficiently capture the
               | limitation. The Intel memory bandwidth speed you quoted
               | would be for CPU-based inference, but not for gpu
               | inference using shared system memory for spillover model
               | size past the dedicated gpu vram. I think that would
               | necessarily limit _parts of_ the inference procedure (not
               | sure how the split would work, and it would probably
               | depend on whether you 're using something like flash
               | attention or not) to the available PCI-e 3.0 or 4.0
               | available bandwidth, as the gpu needs to communicate over
               | the PCIe bus _then_ over the chipset memory bus.
               | 
               | A GPU connected to a PCIe 3.0 x16 electrical uplink would
               | be constrained to ~16GB/s, or ~32GB/s if it were a PCIe
               | 4.0 uplink instead. Although those numbers imply slower
               | bandwidth than CPU inference, that bottleneck would only
               | be when paging in or out (or directly accessing?) layers
               | overflowed to the shared system ram, so they don't really
               | represent much on their own.
        
               | bdcs wrote:
               | Excellent comparison. However, I am confused by
               | 
               | > no more than two cards per PC
               | 
               | I've seen quad 4090 builds, e.g. here[0]. What do you
               | mean no more than two cards? Yes, power is definitely an
               | issue with multiple 4090s, though you can limit the max
               | power using `nvidia-smi`, which IME doesn't hurt (mem-
               | bottlenecked) inference.
               | 
               | [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/watercooling/comments/16ed8f
               | u/quad_...
        
           | jchw wrote:
           | LLMs seem to be a bit more accessible than some other ML
           | models though, because on a good CPU, even LLaMA2 70b is
           | borderline usable (bit under a token/second LLaMA2 70b on an
           | AMD Ryzen 7950X3D, using ~40 GiB of RAM.) Combined with RAM
           | being relatively cheap, seems to me like this is the most
           | accessible option for most folks. While an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D
           | or Intel Core i9 13900K are relatively expensive parts,
           | they're not that bad (you could probably price out two entire
           | rigs for less than the cost of a single RTX 4090) and as a
           | bonus, you get pretty excellent performance for code
           | compilation, rendering, and whatever other CPU-bound tasks
           | you might have. If you're like me and you already have been
           | buying expensive CPUs to speed up code compilation, the fact
           | that you can just run llama.cpp to mess around is merely a
           | bonus.
        
             | mrob wrote:
             | LLM inference is bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. You'll
             | probably get identical speed with cheaper CPUs.
        
               | dannyw wrote:
               | Yep, get the fastest memory you can.
               | 
               | I wish there were affordable platforms with quad DDR5.
        
               | milkcr4t3 wrote:
               | The cache size of those 3d CPUs should definitely play
               | some sort of role.
               | 
               | I can only speculate that it would help mitigate latency
               | with loose timings on a fast OC among other things.
        
               | jchw wrote:
               | I'd like to see some benchmarks. For one thing, I suspect
               | you'd at least want an X3D model for AMD, due to the
               | better cache. But for another, at least according to top,
               | llama.cpp does seem to manage to saturate all of the
               | cores during inference. (Although I didn't try messing
               | around much; I know X3D CPUs do not give all cores "3D
               | V-Cache" so it's possible that limiting inference to just
               | those cores would be beneficial.)
               | 
               | For me it's OK though, since I want faster compile times
               | anyway, so it's worth the money. To me local LLMs are
               | just a curiosity.
               | 
               | edit: Interesting information here. https://old.reddit.co
               | m/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/14ilo0t/extensi...
               | 
               | > RAM speed does not matter. The processing time is
               | identical with DDR-6000 and DDR-4000 RAM.
               | 
               | You'd really expect DDR5-6000 to be advantageous. I think
               | that AMD Ryzen 7xxx can at least take advantage to up to
               | 5600. Does it perhaps _not_ wind up bottlenecking on
               | memory? Maybe quantization plays a role...
        
               | my123 wrote:
               | The big cache is irrelevant for this use case. You're
               | memory bandwidth bound, with a substantial portion of the
               | model read for each token, so that a 128MB cache doesn't
               | help.
        
               | mrob wrote:
               | >> RAM speed does not matter. The processing time is
               | identical with DDR-6000 and DDR-4000 RAM.
               | 
               | That's referring specifically to prompt processing, which
               | uses a batch processing optimization not used in normal
               | inference. The processed prompt can also be cached so you
               | only need to process it again if you change it. Normal
               | inference benefits from faster RAM.
        
             | wing-_-nuts wrote:
             | >bit under a token/second
             | 
             | When you say 'token' is this a word? A character? I've
             | never gotten a good definition for it beyond 'a unit of
             | text the llm processes'
        
               | jchw wrote:
               | More common words can be just one token, but most words
               | will be a few tokens. A token is neither a character nor
               | a word, it's more like a word fragment.
        
               | tga_d wrote:
               | My amateur intuition, having played around with local
               | llms a little bit and seeing things load a token at a
               | time, is that they're conceptually like if you took all
               | n-grams for all lengths n, then sorted them by frequency
               | in the training data, and truncated that list at some
               | point. So the most common words, or even most common
               | words+punctuation, will be one token, less common words
               | with "normal" spelling will be a few tokens, while
               | unusual words with atypical letter combinations will be
               | many tokens. So, e.g., " the" will probably be one token,
               | but "qzxv" will probably be four, depending on what the
               | training set was (something mostly trained on Wikipedia
               | will have different tokens than something mostly trained
               | on code).
        
               | adw wrote:
               | It is a unit of text the LLM processes. :-)
               | 
               | Everyone uses (byte pair encoding)[https://en.wikipedia.o
               | rg/wiki/Byte_pair_encoding] to generate their tokens; the
               | tokens are whatever emerge from this. They will typically
               | correspond to the most common substrings in the training
               | corpus in, handwaving a bit, a max-cover sense; it's an
               | encoding which attempts to best compress the data the
               | tokenizer was trained on.
        
               | pulse7 wrote:
               | 1 Token ~= 3/4 word
        
               | kcorbitt wrote:
               | A good way to build intuition for how much text fits in a
               | token is by pasting a block of text into a tokenizer
               | playground, like this one:
               | https://huggingface.co/spaces/Xenova/the-tokenizer-
               | playgroun...
        
           | irthomasthomas wrote:
           | According to their PR, this should only need the same
           | resources as a 13B model. So 26GB @ f16, 13GB at f8. Edit: I
           | may have misread it, they mention it having the same speed
           | and cost as a 13B model, and I assumed that referred to vram
           | footprint, too, but maybe not...                 "Mixtral is
           | a sparse mixture-of-experts network. It is a decoder-only
           | model where the feedforward block picks from a set of 8
           | distinct groups of parameters. At every layer, for every
           | token, a router network chooses two of these groups (the
           | "experts") to process the token and combine their output
           | additively.            This technique increases the number of
           | parameters of a model while controlling cost and latency, as
           | the model only uses a fraction of the total set of parameters
           | per token. Concretely, Mixtral has 46.7B total parameters but
           | only uses 12.9B parameters per token. It, therefore,
           | processes input and generates output at the same speed and
           | for the same cost as a 12.9B model."
        
             | andersa wrote:
             | All parameters still need to be loaded into vram, it'll
             | dynamically select two submodels to run on each token so it
             | would be extremely slow to swap them out.
        
               | behnamoh wrote:
               | Then what's the advantage of this technique compared to
               | running a +50B model in the first place?
        
               | nulld3v wrote:
               | The model is quicker to evaluate. So quicker responses
               | and more throughput.
        
               | hnuser123456 wrote:
               | Speed, assuming you have the RAM to have it all loaded,
               | it's faster than a fully connected network of the same
               | size by 4x
        
               | rileyphone wrote:
               | It's better if you're hosting inference, worse if you are
               | using it for a dedicated purpose. Presumably in the
               | future it might make sense to share one local MoE among
               | the different programs that use it, especially for a
               | demand-heavy application like programming.
        
               | andersa wrote:
               | It's faster to run inference and training. Less memory
               | bandwidth needed.
        
               | irthomasthomas wrote:
               | I'm confused, though, how then do they claim it needs the
               | same resources as 13B? Is that amortised over parallel
               | usage or something?
        
               | gorbypark wrote:
               | The same compute resources, but not the same VRAM. It
               | will more or less get you the same tokens per second as a
               | ~13B model but should have significantly "higher quality
               | output" than a single 13B model.
        
       | bilsbie wrote:
       | I wonder if the brain uses a mixture of experts?
        
         | MVissers wrote:
         | We have regions that specialize in specific tasks. Information
         | gets routed there for recognition and understanding.
         | 
         | Eg: Faces are processed in the fusiform area. And if you play
         | pokemon obsessively as a kid, you'll even create an expert
         | pokemon region: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/06/regular-
         | pokemon-players...
        
       | i8comments wrote:
       | The claim that it is better than GPT3.5, in practice, should be
       | taken with a grain of salt, since the benchmarks themselves
       | aren't... ideal.
       | 
       | Despite the questionable marketing claim, it is a great LLM for
       | other reasons.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | Plus benchmarks are typically ran from the API, using a tagged
         | version of 3.5-turbo and not the whatever extra tuning and
         | prompt magic ChatGPT as a frontend has to actually get the
         | better results that people see in practice.
         | 
         | On the other hand, if the base instruct model is good enough to
         | roughly match it then the fine tunes will be interesting for
         | sure.
        
       | chandureddyvari wrote:
       | Sorry if this is a dumb question. Can someone explain why it's
       | called 8x7B(56B) but it has only 46.7B params? and it uses 12.9B
       | params per token generation but there are 2 experts(2x7B) chosen
       | by a 2B model? I'm finding it difficult to wrap my head around
       | this.
        
         | pilotneko wrote:
         | I haven't looked at the structure carefully, but It's hard to
         | guess there are shared layers between models. Likely the input
         | layers for sure, since there is no need to tokenize separately
         | for each model (unless different models have specialized
         | vocabulary).
        
           | lordswork wrote:
           | This is my understanding as well. Also includes the
           | parameters of the expert-routing gating network.
        
         | brrrrrm wrote:
         | mixture of experts gates on the feed forward network only. the
         | shared weights are the KQV projections for the attention
         | mechanism of each layer.
        
         | shekhar101 wrote:
         | Explanation from Andrej karpathy makes sense on why: ''' "8x7B"
         | name is a bit misleading because it is not all 7B params that
         | are being 8x'd, only the FeedForward blocks in the Transformer
         | are 8x'd, everything else stays the same. Hence also why total
         | number of params is not 56B but only 46.7B. '''
        
       | matrix2596 wrote:
       | the model says 8x7B model, so its a 56B model. what is the GPU
       | memory requirements to run this model for a 512 context size? are
       | there any feasible quantization models of this available? I want
       | to know if my 16GB VRAM GPU can run this model? Thanks
        
         | Jackson__ wrote:
         | According to
         | https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mixtral-8x7B-v0.1-GGUF :
         | 
         | 18.14GB in 2bit, which is still too high for your GPU, and most
         | likely borders on unusable in terms of quality. You could
         | probably split it between CPU and GPU, if you don't mind the
         | slowdown.
        
       | _giorgio_ wrote:
       | Can mixtral be fine tuned in any way?
        
         | roguas wrote:
         | yes, they dropped instruct model already and i think people are
         | churning the variety as we speak
        
       | ComputerGuru wrote:
       | I'm surprised no one has commented on the context size
       | limitations of these offerings when comparing to the other
       | models. The sliding window technique really does effectively
       | cripple its recall to approximately just 8k tokens which is just
       | plain insufficient for a lot of tasks.
       | 
       | All these llama2 derivatives are only effective if you fine tune
       | them, not just because of the parameter count as people keep
       | harping but perhaps even more so because of the tiny context
       | available.
       | 
       | A lot of my GPT3.5/4 usage involves "one offs" where it would be
       | faster to do the thing by hand than to train/fine-tune first,
       | made possible because of the generous context window and some
       | amount of modest context stuffing (drives up input token costs
       | but still a big win).
        
         | tbalsam wrote:
         | A lot of attention window stuff is fluff IMPE, just gotta look
         | at the benchmarks regardless of what the raw numbers sat.
        
           | ComputerGuru wrote:
           | Benchmarks are, by definition, artificial. I'm speaking from
           | real-world experience, not from "based off the architecture,
           | here's my guess" and lack of context or poor recall within
           | the "supported" context window is a real problem.
        
             | tbalsam wrote:
             | Yes, this is partially due, among other reasons, to the
             | fact that inference induces a domain shift compared to
             | training due to the use of teacher forcing.
        
         | potatoman22 wrote:
         | 8k tokens is about 6000 words, which is more than enough for
         | most classification tasks. Maybe it's not enough for something
         | like story writing, but I feel like it's enough context for
         | most business use cases.
        
           | ComputerGuru wrote:
           | Using an llm like Mistral or GPT for solely for
           | classification is like using a jackhammer to drive framing
           | nails. A lot of business needs require feeding the llm plenty
           | of docs to analyze and then extract something out of,
           | summarize, draw relationships between, etc and almost none of
           | that can be done in 6k words. I can't even use 8k (or so-
           | called "32k") models to analyze a moderate length Wikipedia
           | article.
        
       | inChargeOfIT wrote:
       | It sounds like the same requirements as a 70b+ model, but if
       | someone manages to get inference running locally on a single
       | rtx4090 (AMD 7950x3D w/ 64GB ddr5) reasonably well, please let me
       | know.
        
       | BryanLegend wrote:
       | Andrej Karpathy's Take:
       | 
       | Official post on Mixtral 8x7B: https://mistral.ai/news/mixtral-
       | of-experts/
       | 
       | Official PR into vLLM shows the inference code:
       | https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/commit/b5f882cc98e2c9c6...
       | 
       | New HuggingFace explainer on MoE very nice:
       | https://huggingface.co/blog/moe
       | 
       | In naive decoding, performance of a bit above 70B (Llama 2), at
       | inference speed of ~12.9B dense model (out of total 46.7B
       | params).
       | 
       | Notes: - Glad they refer to it as "open weights" release instead
       | of "open source", which would imo require the training code,
       | dataset and docs. - "8x7B" name is a bit misleading because it is
       | not all 7B params that are being 8x'd, only the FeedForward
       | blocks in the Transformer are 8x'd, everything else stays the
       | same. Hence also why total number of params is not 56B but only
       | 46.7B. - More confusion I see is around expert choice, note that
       | each token _and also_ each layer selects 2 different experts (out
       | of 8). - Mistral-medium
       | 
       | Source: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1734251375163511203
        
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