ColossalAI VS DeepSpeed

> open-source a complete RLHF pipeline ... based on the LLaMA pre-trained model

I've gotten to where when I see "open source AI" I now know it's "well, except for $some_other_dependencies"

Anyway: https://scribe.rip/@yangyou_berkeley/colossalchat-an-open-so... and https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI#readme (Apache 2) can save you some medium.com heartache at least

Quick Read: https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/04/01/meet-colossalchat-an-open-source-ai-solution-for-cloning-chatgpt-with-a-complete-rlhf-pipeline/ Github: https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI Examples: https://chat.colossalai.org/

One of the current methods for training competing models is to have ChatGPT literally create prompt -> completion data sets. That's what was used for https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI. A model based off of the Llama weights released by facebook, then fine tuned on ChatGPT3.5 prompt + completions. So yes, there is a good chance that google is literally using ChatGPT in the training loop.

Here's the github from the article:

https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI

The article talks about their RLHF implementation briefly. There’s details on their RLHF implementation here: https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI/blob/a619a190df71ea3...

Here’s the project on GitHub: https://github.com/hpcaitech/ColossalAI

DeepSpeed can handle parallelism concerns, and even offload data/model to RAM, or even NVMe (!?) . I'm surprised I don't see this project used more.

While on the surface, a 192GB Mac Studio seems like a great deal (it's not much more than a 48GB A6000!), there are several reasons why this might not be a good idea:

* I assume most people have never used llama.cpp Metal w/ large models. It will drop to CPU speeds whenever the context window is full: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/1730#issuecomm... - while sure this might be fixed in the future, it's been an issue since Metal support was added, and is a significant problem if you are actually trying to actually use it for inferencing. With 192GB of memory, you could probably run larger models w/o quantization, but I've never seen anyone post benchmarks of their experiences. Note that at that point, the limited memory bandwidth will be a big factor.

* If you are planning on using Apple Silicon for ML/training, I'd also be wary. There are multi-year long open bugs in PyTorch[1], and most major LLM libs like deepspeed, bitsandbytes, etc don't have Apple Silicon support[2][3].

You can see similar patterns w/ Stable Diffusion support [4][5] - support lagging by months, lots of problems and poor performance with inference, much less fine tuning. You can apply this to basically any ML application you want (srt, tts, video, etc)

Macs are fine to poke around with, but if you actually plan to do more than run a small LLM and say "neat", especially for a business, recommending a Mac for anyone getting started w/ ML workloads is a bad take. (In general, for anyone getting started, unless you're just burning budget, renting cloud GPU is going to be the best cost/perf, although on-prem/local obviously has other advantages.)

[1] https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A...

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/issues/1580

[3] https://github.com/TimDettmers/bitsandbytes/issues/485

[4] https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/disc...

[5] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ai-generated-art-stable...

And https://github.com/microsoft/deepspeed

DeepSpeed Chat: Easy, Fast and Affordable RLHF Training of ChatGPT-like Models at All Scales (https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/tree/master/blogs/deepspeed-chat)