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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Facebook's LLaMa{-7B,-13B,-30B,-65B} has apparently been leaked on 4chan via torrent. Amusingly, the leaker included sufficient info to identify himself in the leak: basic opsec, people!

It's still not quite runnable for most hobbyists, but give it time. For better or worse, the democratization of AI continues.

I'll be the one to ask the stupid question; For those of us whom haven't been exhaustively following software development, what does 'LLaMa{-7B,-13B,-30B,-65B}' actually mean?

Like already answered, this is the number of parameters. A parameter is the same thing as a weight, a unit loosely inspired by the synapse in biological systems like ourselves: a coefficient that is adjusted during training to reduce the predictive error, maximize reward or however else the objective function is defined for the purpose of a given project.

You can consider the number of parameters to be a measure of a neural network's expressivity: theoretically, the more parameters there are, the more algorithms, or more complex ones, can be learned/approximated by the model (this is a nice elegant illustration of the sense in which a neural network learns to represent an algorithm). But in practice, for now it seems that most models, and virtually all models released prior to Google's Chinchilla, are grossly overparametrized: a smaller network trained in a reasonable way on the same amount of data learns more or less the same skills, and a smaller model trained for longer learns qualitatively more, in that it actually reaches the underlying algorithms that allow it to find solutions in the general case, and doesn't just memorize superficial patterns or even raw data itself.* In this case, LLaMA-13B (13 billion parameters) is allegedly equal in benchmark performance/apparent "intelligence" to GPT-3-175B, so it's more parameter-efficient by a factor of 13,46, and also vastly more efficient in terms of training expense. The main secret is that it was exposed to 1 trillion tokens (a character group that's basically equivalent to a short word, see here), whereas GPT-3 only saw 500 billion. (It must be added that the average LLaMA token is shorter, because it uses character-level tokenization for numbers, so it should also have better arithmetic). The biggest LLaMA is trained on 1.4T tokens like Chinchilla-70B (with the same caveat about tokenizing numbers) and, for some not so trivial reasons, is slightly better still.

Aside from the total number, what matters is parameter precision. Models are usually distributed with fp32 weights. As Elon Musk notes, int8 (1 byte per parameter) is fine for inference. @ThenElection may be wrong here, I think 7B and even 13B will run just fine – after some tuning by nice anons, of course – on recent Apple Silicon Macbooks, with even 33B possible on top-of-the-line 64Gb version** (curiously, in one benchmark, 33B model is superior to the 65B one).

See @Porean's experimental results here and the recent AAQC winner @TransgenicSolution's related note here.

*That said, super-large models still seem to have unique emergent capabilities, though as we proceed with training Chinchilla-proportioned models, fewer and fewer such capabilities remain. Before UL2-20B, the consensus was that you need like 60B or 100+ to get advantages from chain-of-thought prompting.

** tfw no 64B M3 macbook to run your personal genie

Edits: typos

You and everyone else answered this wonderfully, thank you.

I confess, a part of me can't help but be excited at the notion of this getting 'out to the masses', so to speak, and what weaponized autism will do with such a tool.

Fun times ahead, I think.

It feels like the long-predicted spampocalyse might now become a reality.

Notably, this model is quite a lot better than what state actors previously had unfettered access to, if they decide to go that route.