FlexGen VS DeepSpeed

LLaMA, Pythia, RWKV, Flan-T5 (self-hosted), FlexGen

> With no real knowledge of LLM and only recently started to understand what LLM terms mean, such as 'model, inference, LLM model, intruction set, fine tuning' whatelse do you think is required to make a took like yours?

This was mee a few weeks ago. I got interested in all this when FlexGen (https://github.com/FMInference/FlexGen) was announced, which allowed to run inference using OPT model on consumer hardware. I'm an avid user of Stable Diffusion, and I wanted to see if I can have an SD equivalent of ChatGPT.

Not understanding the details of hyperparameters or terminology, I basically asked ChatGPT to explain to me what these things are:

   Explain to someone who is a software engineer with limited knowledge of ML terms or linear algebra, what is "feed forward" and "self-attention" in the context of ML and large language models. Provide examples when possible.

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)