Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Series: LLMs on personal devices

Large language models that can run on our own devices open up exciting new ways in which these tools can be used.

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Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment

The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the time.

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Stanford Alpaca, and the acceleration of on-device large language model development

On Saturday 11th March I wrote about how Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment. Today is Monday. Let’s look at what’s happened in the past three days.

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Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85,000 and run it in a browser?

I think it’s now possible to train a large language model with similar functionality to GPT-3 for $85,000. And I think we might soon be able to run the resulting model entirely in the browser, and give it capabilities that leapfrog it ahead of ChatGPT.

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Thoughts on AI safety in this era of increasingly powerful open source LLMs

This morning, VentureBeat published a story by Sharon Goldman: With a wave of new LLMs, open source AI is having a moment — and a red-hot debate. It covers the explosion in activity around openly available Large Language Models such as LLaMA—a trend I’ve been tracking in my own series LLMs on personal devices—and talks about their implications with respect to AI safety.

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Web LLM runs the vicuna-7b Large Language Model entirely in your browser, and it’s very impressive

A month ago I asked Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85,000 and run it in a browser?. $85,000 was a hypothetical training cost for LLaMA 7B plus Stanford Alpaca. “Run it in a browser” was based on the fact that Web Stable Diffusion runs a 1.9GB Stable Diffusion model in a browser, so maybe it’s not such a big leap to run a small Large Language Model there as well.

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Let’s be bear or bunny

The Machine Learning Compilation group (MLC) are my favourite team of AI researchers at the moment.

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Leaked Google document: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”

SemiAnalysis published something of a bombshell leaked document this morning: Google “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI”.

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My LLM CLI tool now supports self-hosted language models via plugins

LLM is my command-line utility and Python library for working with large language models such as GPT-4. I just released version 0.5 with a huge new feature: you can now install plugins that add support for additional models to the tool, including models that can run on your own hardware.

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Run Llama 2 on your own Mac using LLM and Homebrew

Llama 2 is the latest commercially usable openly licensed Large Language Model, released by Meta AI a few weeks ago. I just released a new plugin for my LLM utility that adds support for Llama 2 and many other llama-cpp compatible models.

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llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer

Mozilla’s innovation group and Justine Tunney just released llamafile, and I think it’s now the single best way to get started running Large Language Models (think your own local copy of ChatGPT) on your own computer.

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Many options for running Mistral models in your terminal using LLM

Mistral AI is the most exciting AI research lab at the moment. They’ve now released two extremely powerful smaller Large Language Models under an Apache 2 license, and have a third much larger one that’s available via their API.

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