ggml VS RWKV-LM

git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml cd ggml mkdir build cd build cmake .. make -j4 gpt-j ../examples/gpt-j/download-ggml-model.sh 6B

Cool. I was just learning about GGUF by creating my own parser for it based on the spec https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml/blob/master/docs/gguf.md (for educational purposes)

If you don't care about the details of how those model servers work, then something that abstracts out the whole process like LM Studio or Ollama is all you need.

However, if you want to get into the weeds of how this actually works, I recommend you look up model quantization and some libraries like ggml[1] that actually do that for you.

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml

Because the library is called ggml, but it supports gguf.

Apparently this guy like a bunch of others like https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml are implementing transformers from papers for people that want them. Pretty cool.

You can access it here: https://github.com/staghado/vit.cpp It has been added to the ggml library on GitHub: https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml

https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml

One note is that prompt ingestion is extremely slow on CPU compared to GPU. So short prompts are fine (as tokens can be streamed once the prompt is ingested), but long prompts feel extremely sluggish.

I did a quick run under profiler and on my AVX2-laptop the slowest part (>50%) was matrix multiplication (sgemm).

In current version of GGML if OpenBLAS is enabled, they convert matrices to FP32 before running sgemm.

If OpenBLAS is disabled, on AVX2 plaftorm they convert FP16 to FP32 on every FMA operation, which even worse (due to repetition). After that, both ggml_vec_dot_f16 and ggml_vec_dot_f32 took first place in profiler.

Source: https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml/blob/master/src/ggml.c#L10...

For those getting started, the easiest one click installer I've used is Nomic.ai's gpt4all: https://gpt4all.io/

This runs with a simple GUI on Windows/Mac/Linux, leverages a fork of llama.cpp on the backend and supports GPU acceleration, and LLaMA, Falcon, MPT, and GPT-J models. It also has API/CLI bindings.

I just saw a slick new tool https://ollama.ai/ that will let you install a llama2-7b with a single `ollama run llama2` command that has a very simple 1-click installer for Apple Silicon Mac (but need to build from source for anything else atm). It looks like it only supports llamas OOTB but it also seems to use llama.cpp (via Go adapter) on the backend - it seemed to be CPU-only on my MBA, but I didn't poke too much and it's brand new, so we'll see.

For anyone on HN, they should probably be looking at https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp and https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml directly. If you have a high-end Nvidia consumer card (3090/4090) I'd highly recommend looking into https://github.com/turboderp/exllama

For those generally confused, the r/LocalLLaMA wiki is a good place to start: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/wiki/guide/

I've also been porting my own notes into a single location that tracks models, evals, and has guides focused on local models: https://llm-tracker.info/

https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM#rwkv-discord-httpsdiscord... lists a number of implementations of various versions of RWKV.

https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM#rwkv-parallelizable-rnn-w... :

> RWKV: Parallelizable RNN with Transformer-level LLM Performance (pronounced as "RwaKuv", from 4 major params: R W K V)

> RWKV is an RNN with Transformer-level LLM performance, which can also be directly trained like a GPT transformer (parallelizable). And it's 100% attention-free. You only need the hidden state at position t to compute the state at position t+1. You can use the "GPT" mode to quickly compute the hidden state for the "RNN" mode.

> So it's combining the best of RNN and transformer - great performance, fast inference, saves VRAM, fast training, "infinite" ctx_len, and free sentence embedding (using the final hidden state).

> "Our latest version is RWKV-6,*

That is not true. There are RNNs with transformer/LLM-like performance. See https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM.

This is what RWKV (https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM) was made for, and what it will be good at.

Wow. Pretty darn cool! <3 :'))))

Thanks for the support! Two weeks ago, I'd have said longer contexts on small on-device LLMs are at least a year away, but developments from last week seem to indicate that it's well within reach. Once the low hanging product features are done, I think it's a worthy problem to spend a couple of weeks or perhaps even months on. Speaking of context lengths, recurrent models like RWKV technically have infinite context lengths, but in practice the context slowly fades away after a few thousands of tokens.

This is the reason there are only a few AI labs, and they show little of the theoretical and scientific understanding you believe is required. Go check their code, there's nothing there. Even the transformer with it's heads and other architectural elements turns out to not do anything and it is less efficient than RNNs. (see https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM)

I've been pondering the same thing, as simply extending the context window in a straightforward manner would lead to a significant increase in computational resources. I've had the opportunity to experiment with Anthropics' 100k model, and it's evident that they're employing some clever techniques to make it work, albeit with some imperfections. One interesting observation is that their prompt guide recommends placing instructions after the reference text when inputting lengthy text bodies. I noticed that the model often disregarded the instructions if placed beforehand. It's clear that the model doesn't allocate the same level of "attention" to all parts of the input across the entire context window.

Moreover, the inability to cache transformers makes the use of large context windows quite costly, as all previous messages must be sent with each call. In this context, the RWKV-LM project on GitHub (https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM) might offer a solution. They claim to achieve performance comparable to transformers using an RNN, which could potentially handle a 100-page document and cache it, thereby eliminating the need to process the entire document with each subsequent query. However, I suspect RWKV might fall short in handling complex tasks that require maintaining multiple variables in memory, such as mathematical computations, but it should suffice for many scenarios.

On a related note, I believe Anthropics' Claude is somewhat underappreciated. In some instances, it outperforms GPT4, and I'd rank it somewhere between GPT4 and Bard overall.

> The only reason open-source LLMs have a heartbeat is they’re standing on Meta’s weights.

Not necessarily.

RWKV, for example, is a different architecture that wasn't based on Facebook's weights whatsoever. I don't know where BlinkDL (the author) got the training data, but they seem to have done everything mostly independently otherwise.

https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

disclaimer: I've been doing a lot of work lately on an implementation of CPU inference for this model, so I'm obviously somewhat biased since this is the model I have the most experience in.

I think the main concern is that, due to the resources put into LLM research for finding new ways to refine and improve them, that work can then be used by projects that do go the extra mile and create things that are more than just LLMs. For example, RWKV is similar to an LLM but will actually change its own model after every processed token, thus letting it remember things longer-term without the use of 'context tokens'.