faster-whisper VS vllm

Faster-whisper (https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper)

For our real-time STT needs, we'll employ a fantastic library called faster-whisper.

Thermostats: https://www.sinopetech.com/en/products/thermostat/

I haven't tried running a local text-to-speech engine backed by an LLM to control Home Assistant. Maybe someone is working on this already?

TTS: https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper

LLM: https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile/releases

LLM: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B-D...

It would take some tweaking to get the voice commands working correctly.

Could someone elaborate how is this accomplished and is there any quality disparity compared to original whisper?

Repos like https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper makes immediate sense about why it's faster than the original, but this one, not so much, especially considering it's even much faster.

Cool! I had the same project idea recently. You may be interested in this for the step of speech2text: https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper

That's the implication. If the distil models are same format as original openai models then the Distil models can be converted for faster-whisper use as per the conversion instructions on https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper/

So then we'll see whether we get the 6x model speedup on top of the stated 4x faster-whisper code speedup.

> While I agree that it's much more effort to get things working on AMD cards than it is with Nvidia, I was a bit surprised to see this comment mention Whisper being an example of "5-10x as performant".

It easily is. See the benchmarks[0] from faster-whisper which uses Ctranslate2. That's 5x faster than OpenAI reference code on a Tesla V100. Needless to say something like a 4080 easily multiplies that.

> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/whisper-audio-transcriptio... is a good example of Nvidia having no excuses being double the price when it comes to Whisper inference, with 7900XTX being directly comparable with 4080, albeit with higher power draw. To be fair it's not using ROCm but Direct3D 11, but for performance/price arguments sake that detail is not relevant.

With all due respect to the author of the article this is "my first entry into ML" territory. They talk about a 5-10 second delay, my project can do sub 1 second times[1] even with ancient GPUs thanks to Ctranslate2. I don't have an RTX 4080 but if you look at the performance stats for the closest thing (RTX 4090) the performance numbers are positively bonkers - completely untouchable for anything ROCm based. Same goes for the other projects I linked, lmdeploy does over 100 tokens/s in a single session with LLama2 13b on my RTX 4090 and almost 600 tokens/s across eight simultaneous sessions.

> EDIT: Also using CTranslate2 as an example is not great as it's actually a good showcase why ROCm is so far behind CUDA: It's all about adapting the tech and getting the popular libraries to support it. Things usually get implemented in CUDA first and then would need additional effort to add ROCm support that projects with low amount of (possibly hobbyist) maintainers might not have available. There's even an issue in CTranslate2 where they clearly state no-one is working to get ROCm supported in the library. ( https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2/issues/1072#issuecomm... )

I don't understand what you're saying here. It (along with the other projects I linked) are fantastic examples of just how far behind the ROCm ecosystem is. ROCm isn't even on the radar for most of them as your linked issue highlights.

Things always get implemented in CUDA first (ten years in this space and I've never seen ROCm first) and ROCm users either wait months (minimum) for sub-par performance or never get it at all.

[0] - https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper#benchmark

[1] - https://heywillow.io/components/willow-inference-server/#ben...

guillaumekln/faster-whisper

Neat to see a new implementation, although I'll note that for those looking for a drop-in replacement for the whisper library, I believe that both faster-whisper https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper and https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX are easier (PyTorch-based, doesn't require a web browser), and a lot faster (WhisperX is up to 70X realtime).

One caveat here is that whisper.cpp does not offer any CUDA support at all, acceleration is only available for Apple Silicon.

If you have Nvidia hardware the ctranslate2 based faster-whisper is very very fast: https://github.com/guillaumekln/faster-whisper

I guess the root cause of my claim is that OpenAI won't tell us whether or not GPT-3.5 is an MoE model, and I assumed it wasn't. Since GPT-3.5 is clearly nondeterministic at temp=0, I believed the nondeterminism was due to FPU stuff, and this effect was amplified with GPT-4's MoE. But if GPT-3.5 is also MoE then that's just wrong.

What makes this especially tricky is that small models are truly 100% deterministic at temp=0 because the relative likelihoods are too coarse for FPU issues to be a factor. I had thought 3.5 was big enough that some of its token probabilities were too fine-grained for the FPU. But that's probably wrong.

On the other hand, it's not just GPT, there are currently floating-point difficulties in vllm which significantly affect the determinism of any model run on it: https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/issues/966 Note that a suggested fix is upcasting to float32. So it's possible that GPT-3.5 is using an especially low-precision float and introducing nondeterminism by saving money on compute costs.

Sadly I do not have the money[1] to actually run a test to falsify any of this. It seems like this would be a good little research project.

[1] Or the time, or the motivation :) But this stuff is expensive.

The easiest is to use vllm (https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm) to run it on a Couple of A100's, and you can benchmark this using this library (https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness)

Great question! scheduling workloads onto GPUs in a way where VRAM is being utilised efficiently was quite the challenge.

What we found was the IO latency for loading model weights into VRAM will kill responsiveness if you don't "re-use" sessions (i.e. where the model weights remain loaded and you run multiple inference sessions over the same loaded weights).

Obviously projects like https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm exist but we needed to build out a scheduler that can run a fleet of GPUs for a matrix of text/image vs inference/finetune sessions.

disclaimer: I work on Helix

FYI, vLLM also just added experiment 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!