Megatron-LM VS DeepSpeed

GPU cluster scaling has come a long way. Just checkout the scaling plot here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM

Google's PaLM, Facebook's LLaMA, Nvidia's Megatron, I am missing some surely and Apple sure has something cooking as well but these are the big ones, of course none of them are publicly available, but research papers are reputable. All of the ones mentioned should beat GPT-3 although GPT-3.5 (chatGPT) should be bit better and ability to search (Bing) should level the playing field even further, but Google's PaLM with search functionality should be clearly ahead. This is why people are excited about GPT-4, GPT-3 was way ahead of anyone else when it came out but others were able to catch up since, we'll see if GPT-4 will be another bing jump among LLMs.

Described a collaboration involving NVIDIA Megatron-LM and Microsoft DeepSpeed to create an efficient, scalable, 3D parallel system capable of combining data, pipeline and tensor-slicing-based parallelism.

Microsoft and NVIDIA present the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model (MT-NLG), powered by DeepSpeed and Megatron, the largest and robust monolithic transformer language model trained with 530 billion parameters.

Nvidia's own implementation of Transformers, i.e, Megatron on NVIDIA's Selene supercomputer (where GPT-3 is possible too) -https://github.com/NVIDIA/Megatron-LM

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)

Filed a discussion item on the deepspeed project: https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/discussions/3531

Solution: I don't know; this is where I am stuck. https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed/issues/1037 suggests that I just need to 'apt install libaio-dev', but I've done that and it doesn't help.

There could be some spectrum of this expertise. For instance, https://github.com/NVIDIA/FasterTransformer, https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeed