[HN Gopher] Mistral CEO confirms 'leak' of new open source AI mo...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Mistral CEO confirms 'leak' of new open source AI model nearing
       GPT4 performance
        
       Author : pg_1234
       Score  : 297 points
       Date   : 2024-01-31 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (venturebeat.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (venturebeat.com)
        
       | MallocVoidstar wrote:
       | Check out the PR he submitted:
       | https://huggingface.co/miqudev/miqu-1-70b/discussions/10/fil...
        
       | rrr_oh_man wrote:
       | Cynical me smells a PR move
        
         | seydor wrote:
         | All their PR moves seem to be like this one. Not complaining
        
       | rubymamis wrote:
       | Tweet by Mistral CEO:
       | https://x.com/arthurmensch/status/1752737462663684344
       | 
       | > An over-enthusiastic employee of one of our early access
       | customers leaked a quantised (and watermarked) version of an old
       | model we trained and distributed quite openly.
       | 
       | > To quickly start working with a few selected customers, we
       | retrained this model from Llama 2 the minute we got access to our
       | entire cluster -- the pretraining finished on the day of Mistral
       | 7B release.
       | 
       | > We've made good progress since -- stay tuned!
        
         | Timon3 wrote:
         | I love their approach! Mistral seems to be what I long ago
         | hoped OpenAI to be.
        
           | unshavedyak wrote:
           | Makes me wonder if i should be giving my money to them
           | instead of OpenAI. Do they have a Chat Interface like
           | ChatGPT? Without first signing up, it's looking like they
           | only have endpoints?
        
             | yieldcrv wrote:
             | LM Studio
             | 
             | I use dolphin mixstral 8x7B way more than ChatGPT4 for the
             | past several months
             | 
             | if any of this sentence makes sense, I have a M1 with 64gb
             | RAM and I use 5 bit quantizing with metal with 10,000 token
             | context window. Its around 21 tokens/sec which is a little
             | faster than the text speed that ChatGPT4 responds with
        
               | josephg wrote:
               | What is quality like compared to GPT4?
        
               | yieldcrv wrote:
               | for the kinds of discussions I have it is very close
               | 
               | I often have discussions about political topics that I
               | don't have a complete history on, things that are hard to
               | get a non-emotional non-accusative response from in a
               | forum or in person, licensing questions about obscure
               | professions, liability questions, roleplays without the
               | preachiness about the topic, coding, brand ideas and
               | naming
               | 
               | Lots of stuff that I dont want in any cloud or sent
               | online, but then it just became second nature to
               | primarily use it.
               | 
               | the hallucinations are heavier. like it will give you
               | specific links that it made up, and never apologize like
               | chatgpt will, it will say "no, thats a real link" so,
               | much more of a bullshitter
               | 
               | LM Studio makes it easy to change the temperament though
               | with a variety of premade system prompts, or allowing
               | custom ones very easily
               | 
               | I mainly use ChatGPT4 for multimodal like audio
               | conversations, figuring a DIY problem out by sending it a
               | photo of what I'm looking at, having it render photos on
               | how to use something - I was at a gym and had it look at
               | every piece of equipment there and tell me what it was
               | and show me how a human would use it
               | 
               | (I notice this is at odds with another comment, I havent
               | used ChatGPT3.5 in nearly a year, but my experience with
               | ChatGPT4 on the aforementioned topics is similar to my
               | output in mixtral)
        
               | moralestapia wrote:
               | I can answer that from experience (just built a couple
               | Q&A style sites), although a bit subjectively.
               | 
               | Compared with the GPTs, Mixtral (and derivatives)
               | perform:
               | 
               | * 5% of the time as good as GPT4
               | 
               | * 75% of the time on par with GPT3.5
               | 
               | * 20% of the time a bit worse than GPT3.5 (too chatty and
               | hallucinates with ease, although one could argue a better
               | prompt could improve things a lot)
               | 
               | Advantages of Mixtral, for me:
               | 
               | * Cost 10-100x cheaper
               | 
               | * Faster completion time
               | 
               | * More deterministic output, in the sense that if you run
               | the same query several times you get the same answers
               | back (but they could be wrong). GPT almost always gives
               | me an answer of great quality BUT with a lot of variance
               | across them; even with temperature set to zero. This is a
               | PITA when you want some sort of predictable, structured
               | output like a JSON object.
        
               | sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
               | Another factor is they monkey around with GPT constantly.
               | The GPT you get on Monday may be totally weird on Friday.
               | Whereas for a local model it doesn't change unless YOU
               | change it.
        
             | terhechte wrote:
             | They have an api and it's quite cheap. Their model mistral
             | medium is also very powerful. I use it instead of GPT 4
             | regularly
        
               | suslik wrote:
               | In my experience it is comparable with chatGPT 3.5 but is
               | more expensive (I still use it cause I hate guardrails).
        
               | thierrydamiba wrote:
               | Does mistral not have any guardrails?
        
               | suslik wrote:
               | Mistral API has a flag in the json payload to remove
               | guardrails.
        
               | sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
               | Nope! It's actually for adults to make their own choices
               | and not some SV public relations firm nerfing it.
        
               | sjwhevvvvvsj wrote:
               | You can buy a good GPU and quickly come below cost for
               | GPT APIs depending on your workload. I'm doing millions
               | of tasks, so eating $8k on a custom build for ML up front
               | is a long term cost savings. Not least of all that every
               | other month there's an even better model.
        
         | lordswork wrote:
         | Does watermarked imply they can figure out which customer
         | leaked it?
        
           | danpot wrote:
           | How do they even watermark a LLM?
        
             | pjerem wrote:
             | Make it learn that woziboza is a green cloud shaped like a
             | washing machine ?
        
             | declaredapple wrote:
             | You can either modify the model weights in a way that
             | doesn't cause any real differences (change a few bits
             | somewhere should be enough), or you could watermark the
             | actual text output.
             | 
             | Here's a list of research for watermarking LLMs.
             | 
             | https://github.com/hzy312/Awesome-LLM-
             | Watermark?tab=readme-o...
        
             | einsum wrote:
             | Scott Aaronson did some work on statistical watermarking
             | with OpenAI:
             | https://www.scottaaronson.com/talks/watermark.ppt
        
             | sangnoir wrote:
             | Finetune your standard model on an small, unique set of
             | made-up shibboleths (one per customer) before distributing?
             | Ask the candidate model where the Fribolouth caves are
             | located.
        
           | haolez wrote:
           | It's either that or they can narrow it down to a few people.
        
         | EasyMark wrote:
         | Seems like they have inferior secops on their end. I tried to
         | give it a go and got "an error occurred" in both brave and
         | firefox. Some message about a cookie wasn't found even though I
         | was logging in with my google id which I use flawlessly with a
         | bunch of other services. I have too many other fires to put out
         | so I'll pass on this one I guess.
        
       | janalsncm wrote:
       | > Quantization in ML refers to a technique used to make it
       | possible to run certain AI models on less powerful computers and
       | chips by replacing specific long numeric sequences in a model's
       | architecture with shorter ones.
       | 
       | It's always amusing when the press tries to explain technical
       | concepts. Quantization just means substituting high precision
       | numeric types with lower precision ones. And not specific
       | "numeric sequences", all numbers.
        
         | SilverBirch wrote:
         | It's funny how the original phrase sounds like it was generated
         | by chatgpt. I'd guess the reason they didn't phrase it how you
         | suggest is they probably thought that people who don't know
         | what quantization means aren't going to be happy if you throw
         | precision numerics at them. I don't knwo why they didn't just
         | say "some of the numbers are rounded" though.
        
       | bsaul wrote:
       | GPT-4 has been out for almost a year now, and it seems that the
       | frantic pace of open-ai releasing new groundbreaking tech every
       | month has come to a halt. Anyone knows what's happening with open
       | AI ? has the recent turmoil with sama caused lag in the company ?
       | or are they working on some superweapon ?
        
         | artninja1988 wrote:
         | Probably getting bogged down by endless safety testing and
         | paperwork by now
        
           | harmmonica wrote:
           | Maybe tangential to this comment, but I had been using 3.5 to
           | write contracts, but a couple of weeks back, even when using
           | the exact same prompts that would've worked in the past, 3.5
           | started saying, to paraphrase, "for any contracts you need to
           | get a lawyer."
           | 
           | Anyone else had this experience? It seems like they're
           | actually locking down some very helpful use cases, which
           | maybe falls into the "safety" category or, more cynically, in
           | the "we don't want to be sued" category.
        
             | transcriptase wrote:
             | As they tack on more and more guardrails it becomes lazier
             | and less helpful. One way it gets around admitting that it
             | has instructed not to help you is by directing you to
             | consult a human expert.
             | 
             | I also suspect there's some dynamic laziness parameter
             | that's used to counteract increased load on their servers.
             | You can ask the same prompt over and over in a new chat
             | throughout the day and suddenly instead of writing the code
             | you asked for or completing a task, it will do a small part
             | of the work with "add the code to do xyz here" or explain
             | the steps required to complete a task instead of completing
             | it. It happens with v4 as well.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | > _some dynamic laziness parameter that's used to
               | counteract increased load_
               | 
               | That's a brilliant risk mitigation mechanism! The AI
               | won't recursively self-improve to superhuman levels if it
               | just keeps getting tired of thinking.
        
             | Baeocystin wrote:
             | Add 'reducing compute use as much as possible' to the list,
             | I'm sure. I can look at some of my saved conversations from
             | months ago and feel wistful for what I used to be able to
             | do. The Nerfening has not been subtle.
        
             | HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
             | Using it for legal matters is (understandably) explicitly
             | against use policy. It's not meant to be used for legal
             | advice so the response you're receiving is accurate - go
             | get a lawyer.
             | 
             | https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | It's a toy, it's not meant to be used for anything
               | actually useful - they'll keep nerfing it case by case,
               | because letting users do useful stuff with their models
               | is either leaving money on the table, taking an increased
               | PR/legal risk, or both.
        
         | hdhshxhsvc wrote:
         | Check again in two months
        
         | rgbrgb wrote:
         | I will speculate! They have a model that far surpasses GPT-4
         | (achieved agi internally) but sama is back on a handshake
         | agreement that they will only reveal models that are slightly
         | ahead of openly available LLMs. Their reasoning being that
         | releasing a proprietary model endpoint slowly leaks the models
         | advantage as competitors use it to generate training data.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | > competitors use it to generate training data.
           | 
           | I wouldn't think this matters as long as you charge enough to
           | use that API. For example, you could have a tiered pricing
           | structure where the first 100k words per month generated
           | costs $0.001 per word, but after that it costs $0.01 per
           | word.
        
           | anon291 wrote:
           | WTF is AGI?
           | 
           | EDIT: Clearly the point is lost on the repliers. There is no
           | general understanding of what 'general intelligence' is. By
           | many metrics, ChatGPT already has it. It can answer basic
           | questions about general topics. What more needs to be done?
           | Refinement, sure, but transformer-based models have all
           | qualifications to be 'general intelligence' at this point.
           | The responses are more coherent than many people I've spoken
           | with.
        
             | ebb_earl_co wrote:
             | Artificial General Intelligence
        
               | anon291 wrote:
               | A meaningless term.
        
             | Xirgil wrote:
             | Artificial General Intelligence. OpenAI defines it as
             | "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most
             | economically valuable work"
        
               | anon291 wrote:
               | Okay, well, I'll say that at least that's a definition
               | (it has to be good enough at something to make money).
               | Arguably of course, it already does that. Me personally,
               | I've used it to automate tasks I would have previously
               | shelled out to fiverr, upwork, and mechanical turk. I've
               | had great success using it to summarize municipal codes
               | from very very lengthy documents, down to concise
               | explanations of relevant pieces of information. Since I
               | would have previously paid people to do that (was running
               | an information service for a friend), I would consider
               | that AGI. I guess the catch here is now 'most', but that
               | implies a lot of knowledge about the economy I don't
               | think openai has. What is 'economically valuable'? Who
               | decides?
               | 
               | At the end of the day, as with most things, AGI is a
               | meaningless term because no one knows what that is.
        
             | timeon wrote:
             | Any curve-fitting is now AI, so they had to come with new
             | term.
        
               | anon291 wrote:
               | When you take a university / school course, how is that
               | functionally different from curve fitting? Given that
               | arbitrarily complex states can be modeled as high-
               | dimensional curves, all learning is clearly curve
               | fitting, whether in humans, machines, or even at the
               | abiological level (for example, self optimizing processes
               | like natural selection). Even quantum phenomema are -- at
               | the end of the day -- curve fitting via gradient descent
               | (hopefully it's had enough time to settle at a global
               | minima!)
        
             | wtetzner wrote:
             | Artificial General Intelligence
             | 
             | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intellig
             | e...
        
               | anon291 wrote:
               | The problem with this definition 'an agent that can do
               | tasks animals or humans can perform' is that it's not
               | clear what that would look like. If you produce a system
               | that can be interacted with via text input only but is
               | otherwise capable of doing everything a human can do in
               | terms of information processing, is that AGI? Or does AGI
               | imply a human-like embodied form? Why?
        
         | brucethemoose2 wrote:
         | It's not, its just too much noise to see.
         | 
         | We are getting a lot of great models out of China in particular
         | (Yi, Qwen, InternLM, ChatGLM), and some good continuations like
         | Solar.
         | 
         | Lots of amazing papers on architectures and long context are
         | coming out.
         | 
         | Backends are going crazy. Outlines is shoving constrained
         | generation everywhere, and Lorax is a LLM revelation as far as
         | I'm concerned.
         | 
         | But you won't hear about any of this on Twitter/HN. Pretty much
         | the only thing people tweet about is vllm/llama.cpp and
         | llama/mistral, but there's a lot more out there than that.
        
           | Nick87633 wrote:
           | Where do you like to keep up to date on these? Arxiv
           | preprints, or some other place?
        
             | markab21 wrote:
             | For Llama-based progress - Reddit - /r/LocalLlama has been
             | my top source of info, although it's been getting a little
             | more noisy lately.
             | 
             | I also hang out on a few Discord servers: - Nous Research -
             | TogetherAI / Fireworks / Openrouter - LangChain - TheBloke
             | AI - Mistral AI
             | 
             | These, along with a couple of newsletters, basically keep a
             | pulse on things.
        
               | brucethemoose2 wrote:
               | Lots of interesting information is so fragmented in niche
               | Discords. For instance, KoboldAI on merging and RP models
               | in general, and some other niches. Llama-Index. VoltaML
               | and some others in regards to SD optimization. I could go
               | on and on, and know only a tiny fraction of the useful AI
               | discords.
               | 
               | And yeah, /r/LocalLlama seems to be getting noisier.
               | 
               | TBH I just follow people and discuss stuff on huggingface
               | directly now. Its not great, but at least its not
               | discord.
        
               | cyanydeez wrote:
               | surprised someone doesnt just build an AI aggregator for
               | this type of thing, seems like a real valueable product.
        
               | DANmode wrote:
               | Those rooms move too fast, and often are segregated
               | good/better/best (meaning the deeper you want to go on a
               | topic, the "harder" it is, politically and labor-wise, to
               | get invited to the server).
        
               | brucethemoose2 wrote:
               | They have! And posted them on HN!
               | 
               | Some are pretty good! Check out this little curated
               | nugget: https://llm-tracker.info/
               | 
               | I used to follow one with a UI that resembled HN itself,
               | but now I can't find it in my bookmarks, lol.
        
               | TeMPOraL wrote:
               | Speaking of hard skills: how does one just _hang out on a
               | Discord server_ in any useful fashion? I lost the ability
               | to deal with group chats when I started working full-time
               | - there 's no way I can focus on the job _and_ keep track
               | of conversations happening on some IRC or Discord. I
               | wonder what the trick is to use those things as source of
               | information, other than  "be a teenager, student, or a
               | sysadmin or otherwise someone with lots of spare time at
               | work", which is what I realized communities I used to be
               | part of consist of.
        
             | sanxiyn wrote:
             | I follow https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/
        
           | ipaddr wrote:
           | Submissions on hn are welcome.
        
             | brucethemoose2 wrote:
             | I have submitted some in the past. Others are submitting
             | them! And I upvote every one I like in /new. But HNers
             | don't really seem interested unless its llama.cpp or
             | Mistral, and I don't want to spam.
             | 
             | I can't say I blame them either, there is a lot of insane
             | crypto-like fraud in the LLM/GenAI space. I watch the space
             | like a hawk... and I couldn't even tell you how to filter
             | it, it's a combination of self-training from experience and
             | just downloading and testing stuff myself.
        
               | tmaly wrote:
               | I see a ton of papers on X related to this space.
        
             | cyanydeez wrote:
             | submissions << public interest
        
             | rightbyte wrote:
             | I did try make a submission of what I thought was a
             | "underreported" LLM two months ago.
             | 
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505986
             | 
             | Zero interest for some reason.
             | 
             | Edit: Deepseek coder has 4 submissions to HN with almost
             | zero interest.
        
           | leereeves wrote:
           | Very interesting, but the comment you replied to was
           | specifically asking about OpenAI.
        
             | brucethemoose2 wrote:
             | Yeah I misinterpreted it open ai as "open source ai"
             | 
             | TBH I do not follow OpenAI much. I like my personal models
             | local, and my workplace likes their models local as well.
        
           | alchemist1e9 wrote:
           | LoRAX [0] does sound super helpful and so I'd be curious if
           | there are some good examples of people applying it. What are
           | some current working deployments where one has 100s or 1000s
           | of LoRA fine tuned models? I guess I can make up stuff that
           | makes sense, so that's not really what I'm asking, I'm
           | interested in learning about any known deployments and
           | example setups.
           | 
           | [0] https://github.com/predibase/lorax
        
             | brucethemoose2 wrote:
             | There aren't really any I know of, because its brand new
             | and everyone just uses vllm :P
             | 
             | No one knows about it! Which is ridiculous because batched
             | requests with loras is mind blowing! Just like many other
             | awesome backends like InternLM's backend, LiteLLM,
             | Outline's VLLM fork, Aphroidte, exllamav2 batching servers
             | and and such. Heck, a lot of trainers don't even publish
             | the loras they merge into base models.
             | 
             | Personally we are waiting on the integration with
             | constrained grammar before swapping to Lorax. Then I am
             | going to add exl2 quantization support myself... I hope.
        
               | semmulder wrote:
               | FYI, vLLM also just added experimental multi-lora
               | support: https://github.com/vllm-
               | project/vllm/releases/tag/v0.3.0
               | 
               | Also check out the new prefix caching, I see huge
               | potential for batch processing purposes there!
        
         | infecto wrote:
         | Has it come to a halt? I guess looking only at the perspective
         | of no gpt-5...then yes? But I see wide access to multi-modal.
         | Huge increases to throughput, not much latency these days.
         | Better turbo models though I would agree in some areas those
         | have been steps back with poorer output quality. Adding to that
         | list, massive cost reductions so its easy to justify any of the
         | models being used.
        
         | sp332 wrote:
         | OpenAI has a huge amount of people working on training data.
         | https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
         | https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/openai-chatgpt-ai-jo...
        
         | pstorm wrote:
         | A few theories:
         | 
         | - They have better just stuff, but aren't release it yet. They
         | are at the top already, it makes sense they would hold their
         | cards until someone got close.
         | 
         | - They are more focused on AGI, and not letting themselves get
         | side tracked with the LLM race
         | 
         | - LLMs have peaked and they don't want to release only a minor
         | improvement.
        
           | declaredapple wrote:
           | > - They are more focused on AGI, and not letting themselves
           | get side tracked with the LLM race
           | 
           | FWIW OpenAI seems to have a corroded definition for AGI that
           | is essentially "[An] AI system generally smarter than
           | humans".
           | 
           | They don't seem to use the typical definition I'm used to of
           | some variation of autonomy or (pseudo)-sentience.
           | 
           | So their LLM race is the race for AGI
        
           | JumpCrisscross wrote:
           | > _have better just stuff, but aren 't release it yet_
           | 
           | This hypothesis has a curious habit of surfacing when OpenAI
           | is fundraising. Together with the world-ending potential of
           | their complete-the-sentence kit.
        
         | m3kw9 wrote:
         | Likely the way AI is trained and inferenced there is a huge
         | constraint on the GPU side even if they have GPT5 out. Imagine
         | how slow it is, which means they focus on creating useful
         | products and APIs around it first
        
         | crotchfire wrote:
         | _Anyone knows what 's happening with open AI ?_
         | 
         | Yeah, they're an arms dealer now.
        
           | colordrops wrote:
           | I sometimes wonder if they hit a limit the government was
           | comfortable with and their more advanced technologies are
           | only available to the gov. I assume that's your implication.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | LoRA of war.
        
         | YetAnotherNick wrote:
         | GPT 4 is so far ahead of everything else that it doesn't make
         | much sense to rush for GPT 5 release. They could get extra GPT
         | 5 customers when they release it as they are pretty sure no one
         | else would take away those users.
        
           | nickthegreek wrote:
           | With a higher operating cost as well.
        
         | jsnell wrote:
         | Maybe there are diminishing returns on improving quality, so
         | they're trying to improve the efficiency at a given quality
         | level instead? There is a lot value to producing results
         | instantly, but more importantly efficiency will allow you to
         | serve more users (everyone is bottlenecked on inference
         | capacity) _and_ gain more users thanks to winning on pricing.
        
           | rudasn wrote:
           | Yup, I think this is it. Economies of scale haven't kicked in
           | yet, and if they continue in the same path it doesn't look
           | achievable.
           | 
           | Think differently is again the way forward.
        
         | onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
         | Law of diminishing returns. The low-hanging fruit has been
         | picked.
         | 
         | > But the company's CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will
         | not come from making models bigger. "I think we're at the end
         | of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant
         | models," he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last
         | week. "We'll make them better in other ways."
         | 
         | https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of...
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Given how they've struggled to even make even GPT 4
           | economical it's highly unlikely that larger models would be
           | in any way cost effective for wide use.
           | 
           | And there's certainly more to be found in training longer on
           | better datasets and adjusting the architecture.
        
         | msp26 wrote:
         | Alignment tax is real.
         | 
         | But they probably have something more powerful internally.
         | GPT-4 took months to be available to the public.
        
         | TheCaptain4815 wrote:
         | GPT4 came out 3 years after GPT3
        
           | declaredapple wrote:
           | Slight knitpick
           | 
           | GPT 3.5 came out 2 years after GPT 3
           | 
           | GPT 4 came out 1 year after 3.5
        
             | beAbU wrote:
             | Slight nitpick, but "nitpick" is not spelled with a "k".
        
               | mring33621 wrote:
               | knitpic
        
               | kjreact wrote:
               | Actually nitpick IS spelled with a "k", just not one at
               | the beginning of the word. If we're gonna be pedantic
               | details matter!
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | them and meta have bought like all of Nvidia's production
         | capacity to run and train their next models
        
         | johnfn wrote:
         | I know, it's really disappointing. They've only completely
         | changed the world like 3 times last year.
        
         | shmatt wrote:
         | Probably an unpopular opinion:
         | 
         | A probabilistic word generator is still a word generator. It
         | might be slightly better next version, we've seen it get worse,
         | its more of the same
         | 
         | We can talk about AGI all we want, but it wont be built on the
         | same technology as these word generators. There will have to be
         | a technological breakthrough years before we even get close
         | 
         | The companies focusing on LLMs right now are dealing with
         | 
         | * Generate better words
         | 
         | * Make it cheaper to generate (use less compute)
         | 
         | * Find better training material
         | 
         | There is a ton of money to be made, but its still more of the
         | same
        
           | vanviegen wrote:
           | And humans are just human generators.
           | 
           | In both cases, intelligence appears to be just an interesting
           | emergent side effect.
        
             | discreteevent wrote:
             | 1996 Deep Blue beats Gary Kasparov: "And humans are just
             | chess engines. In both cases intelligence appears to be
             | just an interesting side effect"
        
         | ilaksh wrote:
         | I'm sorry but this comment seems to be incredibly uninformed.
         | OpenAI just released a new version of gpt-4 turbo quite
         | recently. And just in the last couple of days they released the
         | ability to use @ to bring any GPT into a conversation on the
         | fly.
        
       | summarity wrote:
       | Results look comparable to Medium indeed (I'm using it via
       | Mistrals API, since I got sick of OpenAI switching their stuff
       | up). Medium is pretty great, somewhere between 3.5-turbo and
       | 4-turbo qualitatively. Would be awesome to have out there.
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | How does a world where GPTs are like the latest version of apache
       | or mysql, look like? do we go back to the world of millions of
       | web hosts (sorry, AI hosts)
        
       | Tiberium wrote:
       | For some more context see my submission from a few days ago -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175611, although it's
       | admittedly not mistral-medium, but llama2 trained on the same
       | dataset (since the outputs do match quite often with the API)
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | how do we know it's not mistral medium
        
       | brucethemoose2 wrote:
       | Its smart. Definitely keeping it around as my slow/low context
       | local llm.
       | 
       | Seems like a great candiate to merge with other 70Bs as well.
       | There aren't a lot of really great 70B training continuations,
       | like CodeLlama or sequelbox's continuations.
        
       | jstummbillig wrote:
       | The collective game of still just playing catch-up to GPT4, which
       | was released a year ago, while having apparently no special sauce
       | and full well knowing that OpenAI could come up with something
       | much better at any point must be really exhausting.
        
         | rubymamis wrote:
         | > "...it appears that not only is Mistral training a version of
         | this so-called "Miqu" model that approaches GPT-4 level
         | performance, but it may, in fact, match or exceed it, if his
         | comments are to be interpreted generously."
        
         | dougmwne wrote:
         | GPT-4 is an enormous model that took an enormous amount of
         | training. The big news is that smaller teams are getting close
         | to its performance on a small model that can run on a single
         | GPU. No doubt many of these innovations could be scaled up, but
         | pretty much only Google and Microsoft have the compute
         | resources for the behemoth models(Not just the training, but
         | the giant resources required to run the inference for hundreds
         | of millions of users. Google already claims to have surpassed
         | GPT-4 with their unreleased Gemini Ultra model. No doubt
         | OpenAI/Microsoft is sitting on GPT-5 refining it just waiting
         | to leapfrog the competition.
        
           | dom96 wrote:
           | Don't forget about Meta
        
           | anon373839 wrote:
           | Also, GPT-4 isn't actually a model per se. It's a black-box
           | product that uses a model.
        
         | ethanbond wrote:
         | Maybe if OpenAI also seemed like it was getting stronger,
         | especially organizationally. But if I were Mistral and
         | following this quickly while OAI was tripping over its own
         | shoelaces... that's gotta be very exciting.
        
           | sebzim4500 wrote:
           | Is OpenAI tripping over its own shoelaces? They haven't
           | released GPT-5 but then there was over two years between
           | training GPT-3 and GPT-4 and they spent 9 months safety
           | testing GPT-4 before release.
        
         | pb7 wrote:
         | It's more exhausting seeing cheering on a single product
         | provider just because they were first in the age of complaining
         | about giant tech monopolies. Let them cook. The more options,
         | the better. It's only a matter of time before people give
         | OpenAI the Google and Apple treatment.
        
       | mysteria wrote:
       | Why is this being called an open source model? This is a
       | proprietary model that has been leaked on the internet, and will
       | remain so until Mistral releases it officially.
       | 
       | Like Llama 1 they won't care about personal use, but no corp is
       | going to touch this.
        
         | codetrotter wrote:
         | Presumably because it is planned to be released as open source
        
           | jallmann wrote:
           | Open source is really about reproducibility. Most of these
           | model releases are better described as "open weights" because
           | we don't know how exactly they were trained.
        
             | andy99 wrote:
             | No, open source is about software freedom, see debian free
             | software guidelines from which the "open source definition"
             | derives.
             | https://wiki.debian.org/DebianFreeSoftwareGuidelines
             | 
             | Between these and FSF you've got pretty much all the
             | accepted pontificating about free / open source software.
             | Reproducibility is not mentioned because it's not really a
             | consideration for software.
             | 
             | Model weights aren't software so there's not an automatic
             | correspondence between the freedoms, but the essential one
             | you might think you need the training data for is freedom
             | to modify and inspect the source.
             | 
             | Modification is fine tuning which you're free to do if you
             | have the weights. And the model weights + code fully define
             | a system that can be interrogated to give a practitioner
             | relevant info about how the model works (within our
             | understanding) that the training data isn't needed or
             | relevant for. I don't see that any freedom on use or
             | inspection is violated by not having the data.
             | 
             | It could be nice to have it of course, but it's more about
             | using it to learn how, not exercising any freedom.
             | 
             | Incidentally, the big freedom that's usually violated is
             | freedom of discrimination against field of endeavor. LLAMA
             | et al list uses and industries they restrict from using
             | them and because of that are not "open".
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _open source is about software freedom, see debian free
               | software guidelines from which the "open source
               | definition"_
               | 
               | The Open Software Foundation ironically screwed the pooch
               | on this one. Open source commonly means source available,
               | more of less. Free software, as in "'free speech,' not as
               | in 'free beer'," is the cumbersome construction for what
               | open source aspired to mean [1].
               | 
               | [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
        
               | andy99 wrote:
               | Why do you say they screwed up? OSI definition is pretty
               | clear.
               | 
               | I think the naming is a challenge because in English
               | "open" gives the impression that the key point is that
               | you can see it, as opposed to anything about freedom. Is
               | that what you mean?
               | 
               | I have heard it said that open source is sort of a
               | "commercial friendly" version of free software that de-
               | emphasizes user freedom. I think some groups push for
               | that (like Meta is trying to redefine what open source
               | means wrt AI weights). But the OSI defined freedoms
               | basically match what FSF pushes.
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | > _Why do you say they screwed up? OSI definition is
               | pretty clear_
               | 
               | They didn't screw up, they screwed the pooch on open
               | source != source available. The Open Group's members--
               | from IBM to Huawei [1]--started calling the latter open
               | source, which set a precedent that's stuck.
               | 
               | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Group#Member_F
               | orums_a...
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | > Model weights aren't software so there's not an
               | automatic correspondence between the freedoms, but the
               | essential one you might think you need the training data
               | for is freedom to modify and inspect the source.
               | 
               | Models aren't just the weights, but also the list of
               | operations to perform using those weights. I haven't
               | heard a good definition that allows for neural network
               | models to not be software, but allows any other table
               | lookup heavy signal processing algorithm to be software.
               | 
               | > Modification is fine tuning which you're free to do if
               | you have the weights. And the model weights + code fully
               | define a system that can be interrogated to give a
               | practitioner relevant info about how the model works
               | (within our understanding) that the training data isn't
               | needed or relevant for. I don't see that any freedom on
               | use or inspection is violated by not having the data.
               | 
               | Mistral wouldn't constrain themselves to fine tuning if
               | they have a big enough change, they would go back to
               | their build pipeline. This argument sounds a lot like
               | 'there's nothing stopping you from patching the binary,
               | so that's basically as good as source'.
        
               | btown wrote:
               | I often like to think about
               | https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11 as an analogy.
               | It's public domain with available source, in the assembly
               | language in which it was written... so it fills all the
               | definitions of OSS!
               | 
               | But the process by which that code arose, the ability to
               | modify any line and understand its impact (heh) on a real
               | execution environment, is dependent on a massive process
               | that required billions of dollars and thousands of the
               | smartest people on the planet. For all intents and
               | purposes, without that environment, it is as reliably
               | modifiable as an executable binary in any other context -
               | or a set of weights, in this one!
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | I don't think that's a great example.
               | 
               | For instance, I can step through and even modify that
               | code using tooling like AGC emulators like this one
               | http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/#gsc.tab=0
               | 
               | What makes it open source is access to the same level of
               | source access that the original developers worked in.
               | 
               | That's what's missing here. Mistral's engineers do not
               | simply open this binary in their editor to do their job.
        
               | samus wrote:
               | Reproducibility becomes an important criterion for models
               | though.
               | 
               | For normal programs, it is quite easy to decompile an
               | unoptimized binary. Even decompiling an optimized will
               | lead to source code. To make this harder, an obfuscator
               | has to be used.
               | 
               | A model is different because it relies on its weight,
               | which are quite a bit more difficult to inspect. Way
               | harder than even obfuscated source code. It is magnitudes
               | harder to make statements about which information it
               | might divulge upon careful questioning, or evaluate its
               | biases, if the training data is not available.
        
               | andy99 wrote:
               | Even if you have the data you can't do that stuff any
               | better. The makeup of the training set doesn't really
               | define the behavior in any tractable way. If anything I
               | think it's a distraction and even when it is available
               | people probably pay too much attention to what's in the
               | training data vs actual behavior.
               | 
               | Edit to say that I see benefits to having the training
               | data, just that I don't think it's needed to exercise
               | enough freedom to qualify as open source in an analogous
               | way to software.
               | 
               | Also to add, training on GPUs is not generally
               | reproducible anyway because of execution order.
        
           | monocasa wrote:
           | I don't think so, they're earlier release they called "open
           | source" but never released anything other than the binary.
        
           | 2devnull wrote:
           | People really abuse this term. Like using "natural" to market
           | stuff. But arsenic is "all natural"! It's "open source" so it
           | must be beneficial. "rm -rf c" is "open source" too
        
             | TeMPOraL wrote:
             | > _Like using "natural" to market stuff._
             | 
             | Also, because people are idiotically afraid of E-numbers,
             | some manufacturers figured they can find whatever fruit or
             | bean is naturally rich in the relevant E-compound, and use
             | that in the process, allowing them to replace E-whatever
             | with ${cute plant name} in the ingredient list (at some
             | loss of process efficiency).
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | Well I remember Tencent using the leaked NovelAI model in
         | "Different Dimension Me".
        
         | colordrops wrote:
         | Where do you get the idea that corps aren't touching LLama...
        
         | snovv_crash wrote:
         | The weights aren't created by humans so they aren't
         | copyrightable - at least in theory.
        
           | monocasa wrote:
           | That has nothing to do with whether it's open source or not.
           | 
           | Software wasn't for sure copyrightable before 1976 in the US,
           | but there was plenty of closed source code that simply only
           | ever distributed the binaries.
        
             | epistasis wrote:
             | It's open source in the sense that you can take the
             | existing weights, apply any one of dozens of techniques for
             | adapting the model to your data, and anybody you give your
             | model to can do the same.
             | 
             | This right isn't protected by copyright, it's protected by
             | the lack of copyright, and how executables are directly
             | modifiable. So the AGPL won't be possible, but it's a lot
             | like permissive licenses, without attribution.
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | That's like saying an executable that I never gave out
               | the source to is "open source" because there's nothing
               | stopping you from binary patching it.
               | 
               | Also, the license to the model assumes copyright (Apache
               | 2) and works by granting you permissions based on that
               | copyright.
        
               | epistasis wrote:
               | It's very very different from patching a binary, because
               | these models don't work like a simple compilation of
               | understandable source code into incomprehensible weights.
               | The source training data is even less comprehensible and
               | useful than its encapsulation into weights.
               | 
               | A set of weights is a pre-trained local minima in the
               | model space is a both executable and modifiable. It's
               | usually far more useful than the source training data,
               | because the work has been done.
        
               | monocasa wrote:
               | > It's very very different from patching a binary,
               | because these models don't work like a simple compilation
               | of understandable source code into incomprehensible
               | weights. The source training data is even less
               | comprehensible and useful than its encapsulation into
               | weights.
               | 
               | Tons of binary patching works that way. For instance from
               | the gameshark days it was relatively common for a patch
               | that worked for unknown reasons, but who's discovery was
               | tooling assisted and simply displayed a desired effect
               | (and commonly a lot of undesired effects that weren't
               | clear).
               | 
               | > A set of weights is a pre-trained local minima in the
               | model space is a both executable and modifiable.
               | 
               | None of that changes whether it's open source or not. I
               | guarantee you that mistral has some code (and a lot o
               | data) laying around that created this model.
               | 
               | > It's usually far more useful than the source training
               | data, because the work has been done.
               | 
               | For certain operations maybe. I guarantee that Mistral
               | wouldn't constrain themselves to fine-tuning if they had
               | a major change to make to the model.
        
               | sroussey wrote:
               | It's very likely protected by EU copyright.
        
           | Sayrus wrote:
           | Copyright is not the only kind of Intellectual Property.
           | While they may not be copyrightable (I think you may be
           | refering to jugement related to having an AI as author?),
           | they clearly are MistralAI IP.
           | 
           | In the same way, data in a database are usually not
           | copyrightable. They are still the company's property
           | (excluding issues with PII and such).
        
             | bhickey wrote:
             | Database rights don't exist in the United States.
             | 
             | Their weights obviously aren't protected by trademark. So,
             | what IP regime protects the weights?
        
               | Sayrus wrote:
               | Mistral AI is incorporated in Paris, France. IANAL, but I
               | think these[1][2] may qualify to protect these weights.
               | 
               | While there is a discussion to be had on sovereignty and
               | international reaches of local laws (such as DMCA for
               | instance), I think it's disingenuous to consider only US
               | legal point of view.
               | 
               | [1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
               | content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... [2] https://www.legifranc
               | e.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000000573438/...
        
             | greiskul wrote:
             | I'm not so sure. If it is not copyrightable, and it is a
             | patent, and not a trademark, which legal protection would
             | it have? It could definitely be considered a trade secret,
             | and the theft of it and misapproation of it would be a
             | crime, but once it has been published, people that just
             | used the published version I don't believe would be
             | comitting a crime, since it would lose it's trade secret
             | status.
        
               | Sharlin wrote:
               | There are certain "related rights" [1] that are weaker
               | than full copyright. These include, maybe most
               | importantly, performers' rights, but also protection for
               | things like photographs (ones that aren't unique enough
               | to qualify for full copyright) and, in many
               | jurisdictions, databases. These aren't covered by the
               | Berne convention so vary quite a bit. But whether a huge
               | chunk of floating-point numbers qualifies for any legal
               | protection, remains to be seen.
               | 
               | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Related_rights
        
               | sroussey wrote:
               | In Europe you can copyright a database of facts, which is
               | not something you can do in the US.
               | 
               | Also, people go to jail for leaking trade secrets, and
               | this certainly qualifies.
        
           | shiandow wrote:
           | That does raise the question how irreversibly you have to
           | process something before it is no longer protected by
           | copyright.
           | 
           | Obviously zipping something is not enough, even lossy
           | compression is (obviously) not enough. But then how does a
           | language model differ from a lossy compression? Is it just
           | the compression ratio? (are the weights even that much
           | smaller than the data?)
           | 
           | There are ways to train models that guarantee that the amount
           | of information transferred per data point is limited, but to
           | my knowledge those aren't used (and may be prohibitively
           | expensive).
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | When I take a picture with my phone, those pixels weren't
           | created by a human either. Yet I still own their copyright.
           | 
           | At the core the question is how much artistic input there is
           | in creating LLM models. Are the choice of the model
           | architecture, hyperparameters and training data artistic
           | choices comparable to those by a photographer setting up a
           | shot? Or are they more comparable to technical work that's
           | only protectable by trade secrets, patents and trademarks?
        
             | Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
             | The parent is asking about weights and from that
             | perspective, _stochastic approximation_ is essential.
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | "Nearing GPT-4"...
       | 
       | The leaderboard[1] shows that there is a huge gap between
       | GPT4-0314 and GPT4-Turbo. So if you only just are nearing
       | GPT-4-0314, then you're still a year behind the state of the art.
       | 
       | [1]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-
       | leaderboar...
        
         | Terretta wrote:
         | Or you're ahead of it, since the earlier GPT4 models beat the
         | GPT4-Turbo on a variety of technical use cases.
        
           | YetAnotherNick wrote:
           | The leaderboard is easy to hack as well.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | I think you might be thinking of GPT-4-0613? That was pretty
           | crap all round (but was faster)
        
         | kromem wrote:
         | The leaderboards are crap.
         | 
         | Does no one know Goodhart's Law anymore?
         | 
         | We're overtuning for the boards and losing broader capabilities
         | not being selected for in the process, such as creative writing
         | quality.
         | 
         | There's an anchoring bias around what 'AI' is supposed to be
         | good at which reflects what engineers are good at and so the
         | engineers with an anchoring bias are evaluating how good LLMs
         | are at those things and using it as a target.
         | 
         | Skill-Mix is a start to maybe a better approach, but there
         | needs to be a shift in evaluation soon.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | Can you give any example queries where the result quality is
           | far away from the rankings on the leaderboard? In my
           | experience it's pretty spot on, so I'm curious if you're
           | asking different sorts of things, or have a different
           | definition of a good answer.
           | 
           | I have for example asked "Write me a very funny scary story
           | about the time I was locked in a graveyard", and the simpler
           | models don't seem to understand that before getting super
           | scared and running out of the graveyard they need to explain
           | how exactly I was locked in, and what changed that let me
           | out.
        
           | refulgentis wrote:
           | The top comment to an LMSys leaderboard link on HN is always
           | a variation of this song.
           | 
           | And it's always not even wrong, in the Pauli sense of the
           | phrase.
           | 
           | OP, your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to look
           | into how the LMSys leaderboard works and report back what its
           | metric(s) are.
           | 
           | [SPOILER] There's a really absurdly narrow argument you can
           | make where all of its users are engineers, making engineer
           | queries, and LLM makers are optimizing for it thus it's bad.
           | But...it's humans asking queries then picking the better
           | answer, blind. You can't narrowly optimize for that when
           | making an LLM and it's hard to see how optimizing for "people
           | think the answer is better" is the wrong metric here. It's
           | just ELO. Might as well argue chess/checkers/pick your poison
           | is bad because ELO optimizes for wins but actually talent is
           | based on more than winning.
        
           | numeri wrote:
           | The linked leaderboard is actually very trustworthy, in that
           | it consists not of scores on a test dataset, but of ELO
           | ratings generated by actual humans' ratings of the models'
           | responses.
           | 
           | You can go and enter any prompt you like, wait a bit, and
           | then get two LLM responses back, which you can then rank or
           | mark as tied, after which you'll be shown which model each
           | came from. Maybe you already knew this, maybe you didn't. In
           | any case, I don't see any real way for Goodhart's Law to
           | apply here - the metric and the goal are the same here, i.e.,
           | human approval of answers.
        
           | declaredapple wrote:
           | Parent linked the Lmsys chatbot arena which is where humans
           | blindly get the results from two different models, and vote
           | for the response they liked more. So the LLMs are compared by
           | elo.
           | 
           | Do you think goodhart's law applies here, since this
           | leaderboard doesn't use specific measures, but rather relies
           | on whatever the human was looking for?
           | 
           | This is the only leaderboard I personally care about at all.
        
       | nohat wrote:
       | It has been interesting seeing the sleuthing on this one. IMHO it
       | is unfortunate to have this happen to a company that has been
       | very pro open source.
        
       | bee_rider wrote:
       | Since these models are trained by just scraping the internet,
       | "scraping" this thing and including it in your own model seems
       | like fair game, right?
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | If you mean training your model on it I'd say yeah, fair game.
         | 
         | Mistral is Apache 2.0 licensed though so the question is a bit
         | moot, they'd like you to use it for your own model.
        
         | speedgoose wrote:
         | It sounds fair. Just make sure to not involve lawyers.
        
       | dopa42365 wrote:
       | Is this an advertisement for a "promise"? Entirely worthless
       | until there's something to show. It smells.
        
       | a_wild_dandan wrote:
       | Guess I'll watch TheBloke's page until I can run his Miqu Q5
       | quant on my MacBook. Mixtral is my daily driver, and if this (or
       | the newer, official) release nears GPT-4, that's a wrap for my
       | OpenAI subscription.
       | 
       | The small team at Mistral is putting their competitors to shame.
       | They're what "Open"AI should've been.
        
         | MallocVoidstar wrote:
         | Full weights aren't available, only Q2, Q4, Q5 quants via
         | miqudev.
        
           | throwaway9274 wrote:
           | Unquantized model is here:
           | https://huggingface.co/152334H/miqu-1-70b-sf
           | 
           | This strikes me as less a leak and more clever marketing from
           | Mistral.
        
             | MallocVoidstar wrote:
             | That isn't unquantized, it's _de_ -quantized. They went
             | from Q5 to fp16 for use in Pytorch instead of the GGUF
             | ecosystem.
        
               | Taek wrote:
               | I never thought people would be upscaling models by
               | increasing quantization precision. The rationale makes
               | sense bit its also a goofy outcome.
        
               | throwaway9274 wrote:
               | Yes, that's correct. Good correction.
        
         | SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
         | Looks like the leaked model is already quants in gguf format,
         | so no need to wait for TheBloke.
         | 
         | https://huggingface.co/miqudev/miqu-1-70b/tree/main
        
         | brucethemoose2 wrote:
         | The GGML quants are the _only_ quantization we have lol. They
         | were leaked in Q2K /Q4KM/Q5KM, you can grab them right now.
         | 
         | Whats interesting is that Mistral apparently _distributed_
         | these GGUFs. This is (in my experience) not a good format for
         | production, so I am curious exactly who was wanting to test a
         | model in GGUF.
        
           | whatwhaaaaat wrote:
           | It's by far the easiest to consume and run format no? Spans
           | devices easy. No weights or extra stuff. For "production"
           | maybe not but to get in into the hands of the masses this
           | seems perfect.
        
             | brucethemoose2 wrote:
             | Yeah its by far the least trouble. Pretty much any other
             | backend, even a "pytorch free" backend like MLC, is a utter
             | nightmare to install, and that's if it uses a standardized
             | quantization.
             | 
             | However, the llama.cpp server is... very buggy. The OpenAI
             | endpoint doesn't work. It hangs and crashes constantly. I
             | don't see how anyone could use it for batched production as
             | of last november/december.
             | 
             | The reason I don't use llama.cpp personally is no flash
             | attention (yet) and no 8 bit kv cache, so its not too great
             | at long (32K+) contexts. But this is a niche, and being
             | addressed.
        
               | samstave wrote:
               | What are you needing 32K contexts for, as use case
               | examples plz.
               | 
               | From [0] @sdo72 writes::
               | 
               | >>> _...32k tokens, 3 /4 of 32k is 24k words, each page
               | average is 500 or 0.5k words, so that's basically 24k /
               | .5k = 24 x 2 =~48 pages...._"
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35841460
               | 
               | EDIT: I may be ignorant: does the 32k mean its output
               | context, or single conversation attention span, or how
               | much it can ingest in a prompt?
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | Feed it my source code to use as context for how to
               | refactor things. the bigger the context window, the more
               | source code it can "read".
        
               | samstave wrote:
               | Thanks, Curious as I havent been in a forum where Ive
               | seen asked:
               | 
               | Have you found a particular manner in which to feed it in
               | - do you give it instructions for what it is looking for,
               | what kind of phrases are you directing it to do?
               | 
               | I am about to start a try at a gpt co-piloted effort, and
               | I have only done art so far - so curious if there are
               | good pointers on coding with gpt?
        
               | gryn wrote:
               | continue.dev works great for me, supports vs code and
               | jetbrains ide, there's shortcuts to give it code snipets
               | as context and in place editing. works with all kind of
               | LLM sources. both gpt and local stuff.
               | 
               | still haven't found anything that can read a whole
               | project source code in a single click though
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | 32K tokens = "context size" = sum of input tokens + max
               | output tokens
        
               | samstave wrote:
               | Thank you - so you want the most efficient small input
               | tokens for the max output tokens, or at least the best
               | answer with the smallest amount of tokens used - but
               | enough headroom it wont lose context and start down the
               | hallucination path?
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | Going to be extremely opinionated and straightforward
               | here in service of being concise, please excuse me if it
               | sounds rough or wrong, feel free to follow-up:
               | 
               | You're "not even wrong", in that you don't really need to
               | worry about ratio of input to output, or worry about
               | inducing hallucinations.
               | 
               | I feel like things went generally off-track once people
               | in the ecosystem turned RAG into these weird multi-stage
               | diagrams when really it's just "hey, the model doesn't
               | know everything, we should probably give it web pages /
               | documents with info in it"
               | 
               | I think virtually all people hacking on this stuff daily
               | would quietly admit that the large context sizes don't
               | seem to be transformative. Like, I thought it meant I
               | could throw a whole textbook in and get incredibly rich
               | detailed answers to questions. But it doesn't. It still
               | sort of talks the way it talks, but obviously now it has
               | a lot more information to work with.
               | 
               | Thinking out loud: maybe the way I think about it is the
               | base weights are lossy and unreliable. But, if the
               | information is in the context, that is "lossless". The
               | only time I see it gets things wrong is when the
               | information itself is formatted weird _.
               | 
               | All that to say, in practice, I don't see much gains in
               | _question-answering* when I provided > 4K tokens.
               | 
               | But, the large context sizes are still nice because A) I
               | don't need to worry as much about losing previous
               | messages / pushing out history when I add documents as
               | when it was just 4K for ChatGPT. B) It's _really_ nice
               | for stuff like information extraction, ex. I can give it
               | a USMLE PDF and have it extract Q+A without having to
               | batch it into like 30 separate queries and reassamble. C)
               | There 's some obvious cases where the long context length
               | helps, ex. if you know for sure a 100 page document has
               | some very specific info in it, you're looking for a
               | specific answer, and you just don't wanna look it up
               | again, perfect!
               | 
               | * I've been working on "Siri/Google Assistant but cross
               | platform and on LLMs", RAG + local + on all platforms +
               | sync engine for about a [REDACTED]. It can nail ~every
               | question at a high level, modulo my MD friend needs to
               | use GPT-4 for that to happen. The failures I see are if I
               | ask "what's the lakers next game", and my web page =>
               | text algo can't do much with tables, so it's formatted in
               | a way that causes it to error.
        
               | speedgoose wrote:
               | Have you tried ollama? It's another llama.cpp server
               | implementation that is becoming popular.
        
               | gbickford wrote:
               | The authors don't seem to care about the principle of
               | least privilege: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/
               | 851#issuecomment-177...
               | 
               | It makes me wonder what other security issues they might
               | now care about.
        
               | smoothjazz wrote:
               | This is a mac problem, not an ollama problem. It also
               | sounds like it's solved by using homebrew (or linux).
        
               | declaredapple wrote:
               | Just to throw out there - I haven't had any issues with
               | exllama personally, and it's a lot faster last I checked.
        
         | htrp wrote:
         | >The small team at Mistral is putting their competitors to
         | shame.
         | 
         | Them plus 500 million in funding
        
           | api wrote:
           | Much of the cost is probably compute.
        
             | refulgentis wrote:
             | Very unlikely: note best GPT-4 estimates put at it $45
             | million
        
               | a_wild_dandan wrote:
               | Altman said that GPT-4 training was over $100 million.
               | And you need significant additional resources beside just
               | the training run cost.
        
           | tomp wrote:
           | so like 10x less funding than OpenAI and 100x less than MSFT,
           | AAPL, Google, Facebook, ...
        
             | jtonz wrote:
             | I think it's fair to say when you hit the hundreds of
             | millions of dollars mark the diminishing returns for making
             | things happen faster have well and truly kicked in.
             | 
             | Perhaps the only benefit would be extra computational power
             | yet I would struggle to understand the benefit of jumping
             | from 500 million to 5 billion with such short timeframes.
        
         | karmasimida wrote:
         | Near GPT-4 is definitely a stretch.
         | 
         | The hype around Mixtral is huge, and my disappointment follows,
         | it doesn't have very good knowledge on books, for example.
        
           | terhechte wrote:
           | It's a much smaller model, it didn't ingest the knowledge of
           | the world. It is great at working with the information you
           | give it, but if you want to extract information like a search
           | engine, GPT4 is the king because it is so much bigger.
        
           | avereveard wrote:
           | That is a good thing you want the model to process language,
           | knowledge is a side effect of how it gets there. If you rely
           | on training knowledge it's going to be hard to know when you
           | pass the boundary into hallucinations, what you want instead
           | is a model that can pretend reasoning while supporting tools
           | inject knowledge from the world into the context as it
           | iterate toward an answer
        
             | karmasimida wrote:
             | But here is the thing, if you rely on RAG or any other
             | knowledge injection for recommendation, you essentially
             | make your LLM parrot machine, no better than a search
             | engine, just much slower.
             | 
             | Knowledge is one aspect of it, I found its instruction
             | following ability, frustrating as well.
             | 
             | I think Ilya Sutskever puts it very well, larger model
             | brings stability to wider range of tasks, what smaller
             | models are not capable of. Even though book recommendation
             | with GPT might a niche, but it is not something really
             | unexpected TBH, thus comes my disappointment.
        
               | chasd00 wrote:
               | > But here is the thing, if you rely on RAG or any other
               | knowledge injection for recommendation, you essentially
               | make your LLM parrot machine, no better than a search
               | engine, just much slower.
               | 
               | this is a really good point. I was working on some
               | careful q/a data curation today that is then fed to a
               | vector store where embeddings are calculated and served.
               | I realized that my carefully curated q/a data in
               | combination with the vector database works just fine for
               | what i want to do all by itself. A really good semantic
               | search of my q/a database turns up answers to my
               | questions with no rag llm prompting required. When I
               | added the llm it just put the same information in
               | different words, not super useful when i could have just
               | looked at the returned embeddings and gotten the same
               | information.
        
       | chrishare wrote:
       | I hate when that happens
        
       | accrual wrote:
       | What's wild to me is that this "leak" won't matter in a couple of
       | months. The official model will come out, then an even better
       | model will come out. It's fun to get hyped but just like every
       | other leak, it'll be surpassed by the real thing and its
       | successor in a little bit. The fast pace of things is what has me
       | excited, not any particular model.
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | I don't think so, TFA says it's an early version of an old
         | model that's already been distributed openly. ;)
        
       | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
       | Seems paradoxical. How does something that is open source leak?
        
         | vulcan01 wrote:
         | According to the article, it _will_ be open source, but it 's
         | not open source now.
        
       | sharkjacobs wrote:
       | Mistral reminds me of the good old days of pre-2015 when I
       | thought that tech companies were cool.
        
       | syntaxing wrote:
       | What a class act. Going to the leaked model on huggingface, not
       | demanding it to be taken down, and just making a post on the page
       | saying "Might consider attribution" is so damn amazing.
        
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