cortex VS Tribuo

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'.

It seems to have been picked up by Eclipse and there is also Oracle Labs' Tribuo and Deep Java Library. All seem active, but I don't know much about any of them. I agree it's probably best to follow the community and use a more popular tool like PyTorch.

We built model & data provenance into our open source ML library, though it's admittedly not the W3C PROV standard. There were a few gaps in it until we built an automated reproducibility system on top of it, but now it's pretty solid for all the algorithms we implement. Unfortunately some of the things we wrap (notably TensorFlow) aren't reproducible enough due to some unfixed bugs. There's an overview of the provenance system in this reprise of the JavaOne talk I gave here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXOMjq2OS_c. The library is on GitHub - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo.

Although it may be a bit more work, you can do both machine learning and AI in Java. If you are doing deep learning, you can use DeepJavaLibrary (I do work on this one at Amazon). If you are looking for other ML algorithms, I have seen Smile, Tribuo, or some around Spark.

We've been developing Tribuo on Github for two years now, MS are very actively developing ONNX Runtime (and the Java layer is fairly thin and wrapped over the same C API they use for node.js and C#), and things like XGBoost and LibSVM have been around for many years and the Java bits are developed in tree with the rest of the code so updated along with it. Amazon have a team of people working on DJL, though you'd have to ask them what their plans are.

FWIW, Oracle actually did release a Java ML library - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo.

Tribuo (tribuo.org, github.com/oracle/tribuo). ONNX export support is there for 2 models at the moment in main, there's a PR for factorization machines which supports ONNX export, and we plan to add another couple of models and maybe ensembles before the upcoming release. Plus I need to write a tutorial on how it all works, but you can check the tests in the meantime.

You can do ML & data science in Java (full disclosure: I help run TensorFlow-Java, I maintain ONNX Runtime's Java interface, and I'm the lead developer on Oracle Labs' Java ML library Tribuo, so I'm pretty biased). It tends not to be as favoured in research, though I've published academic ML papers which used Java implementations. People do deploy ML models quite a bit in Java in industry.

It might be worth having a look at the ONNX Runtime Java API in addition to TF-Java, it'll let you deploy the rest of the HuggingFace pytorch models that don't have TF equivalents. I built the Java API a few years ago, and it's now a supported part of the ONNX Runtime project. We use it in Tribuo to provide one of our text feature embedding classes (BERTFeatureExtractor).

The IJava notebook kernel works pretty well for data science on top of Java. We use it in Tribuo to write all our tutorials, and if you've got the jar file in the right folder everything is runnable. For example, this is our intro classification tutorial - https://github.com/oracle/tribuo/blob/main/tutorials/irises-tribuo-v4.ipynb.