cortex VS llama.cpp

Jan incorporates a lightweight, built-in inference server called Nitro. Nitro supports both llama.cpp and NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM engines. This means many open LLMs in the GGUF format are supported. Jan's Model Hub is designed for easy installation of pre-configured models but it also allows you to install virtually any model from Hugging Face or even your own.

I'd like to see a comparison to nitro https://github.com/janhq/nitro which has been fantastic for running a local LLM.

Look... I appreciate a cool project, but this is probably not a good idea.

> Built on top of the cutting-edge inference library llama.cpp, modified to be production ready.

It's not. It's literally just llama.cpp -> https://github.com/janhq/nitro/blob/main/.gitmodules

Llama.cpp makes no pretense at being a robust safe network ready library; it's a high performance library.

You've made no changes to llama.cpp here; you're just calling the llama.cpp API directly from your drogon app.

Hm.

...

Look... that's interesting, but, honestly, I know there's this wave of "C++ is back!" stuff going on, but building network applications in C++ is very tricky to do right, and while this is cool, I'm not sure 'llama.cpp is in c++ because it needs to be fast' is a good reason to go 'so lets build a network server in c++ too!'.

I mean, I guess you could argue that since llama.cpp is a C++ application, it's fair for them to offer their own server example with an openai compatible API (which you can read about here: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/4216, https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/examples/...).

...but a production ready application?

I wrote a rust binding to llama.cpp and my conclusion was that llama.cpp is pretty bleeding edge software, and bluntly, you should process isolate it from anything you really care about, if you want to avoid undefined behavior after long running inference sequences; because it updates very often, and often breaks. Those breaks are usually UB. It does not have a 'stable' version.

Further more, when you run large models and run out of memory, C++ applications are notoriously unreliable in their 'handle OOM' behaviour.

Soo.... I know there's something fun here, but really... unless you had a really really compelling reason to need to write your server software in c++ (and I see no compelling reason here), I'm curious why you would?

It seems enormously risky.

The quality of this code is 'fun', not 'production ready'.

Sorry it's taking so long to review and for the radio silence on the PR.

We have been trying to figure out how to support more structured output formats without some of the side effects of grammars. With JSON mode (which uses grammars under the hood) there were originally quite a few issue reports namely around lower performance and cases where the model would infinitely generate whitespace causing requests to hang. This is an issue with OpenAI's JSON mode as well which requires the caller to "instruct the model to produce JSON" [1]. While it's possible to handle edge cases for a single grammar such as JSON (i.e. check for 'JSON' in the prompt), it's hard to generalize this to any format.

Supporting more structured output formats is definitely important. Fine-tuning for output formats is promising, and this thread [2] also has some great ideas and links.

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-generation/json...

[2] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/4218

> Doing everything on-device would result in a horrible user experience. They might as well not participate in this generative AI rush at all if they hoped to keep it on-device.

On the contrary, I'm shocked over the last few months how "on device" on a Macbook Pro or Mac Studio competes plausibly with last year's early GPT-4, leveraging Llama 3 70b or Qwen2 72b.

There are surprisingly few things you "need" 128GB of so-called "unified RAM" for, but with M-series processors and the memory bandwidth, this is a use case that shines.

From this thread covering performance of llama.cpp on Apple Silicon M-series …

https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/4167

… "Buy as much memory as you can afford would be my bottom line!"

I'd love to use local models, but seems like most of the easy to use software out there (LM Studio, Backyard AI, koboldcpp) doesn't really play all that nicely with my Intel Arc GPU and it's painfully slow on my Ryzen 5 4500. Even my M1 MacBook isn't that fast at generating text with even 7B models.

I wonder if llama.cpp with SYCL could help, will have to try it out: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/README-sy...

But even if that worked, I'd still have the problem that IDEs and whatever else I have open already eats most of the 32 GB of RAM my desktop PC has. Whereas if I ran a small code model on the MacBook and connected to it through my PC, it'd still probably be too slow for autocomplete, when compared to GitHub Copilot and less accurate than ChatGPT or Phind for most stuff.

You're correct if you're focused exclusively on the work surrounding building foundation models to begin with. But if you take a broader view, having open models that we can legally fine tune and hack with locally has created a large and ever-growing community of builders and innovators that could not exist without these open models. Just take a look at projects like InvokeAI [0] in the image space or especially llama.cpp [1] in the text generation space. These projects are large, have lots of contributors, move very fast, and drive a lot of innovation and collaboration in applying AI to various domains in a way that simply wouldn't be possible without the open models.

[0] https://github.com/invoke-ai/InvokeAI

[1] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp

The first example will build an Embeddings database backed by llama.cpp vectorization.

and at some point (https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/7444)

git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp.git cd llama.cpp LLAMA_CUDA=1 make -j

I focused on supporting Ollama, GPT4All, and LMStudio, all of which run smoothly on a Mac computer. Many of these tools are user-friendly wrappers around Llama.cpp, allowing easy model downloads and providing a REST interface to query the available models. Last week, I also added "👋🏼 Jan" support because HuggingFace has endorsed this provider out-of-the-box.

The output of the LLM is not just one token, but a statistical distribution across all possible output tokens. The tool you use to generate output will sample from this distribution with various techniques, and you can put constraints on it like not being too repetitive. Some of them support getting very specific about the allowed output format, e.g. https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/grammars/... So even if the LLM says that an invalid token is the most likely next token, the tool will never select it for output. It will only sample from valid tokens.