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2024

I can now run a GPT-4 class model on my laptop

Visit I can now run a GPT-4 class model on my laptop

Meta’s new Llama 3.3 70B is a genuinely GPT-4 class Large Language Model that runs on my laptop.

[... 2,905 words]

Meta AI release Llama 3.3. This new Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct model from Meta AI makes some bold claims:

This model delivers similar performance to Llama 3.1 405B with cost effective inference that’s feasible to run locally on common developer workstations.

I have 64GB of RAM in my M2 MacBook Pro, so I'm looking forward to trying a slightly quantized GGUF of this model to see if I can run it while still leaving some memory free for other applications.

Update: Ollama have a 43GB GGUF available now. And here's an MLX 8bit version and other MLX quantizations.

Llama 3.3 has 70B parameters, a 128,000 token context length and was trained to support English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Spanish, and Thai.

The model card says that the training data was "A new mix of publicly available online data" - 15 trillion tokens with a December 2023 cut-off.

They used "39.3M GPU hours of computation on H100-80GB (TDP of 700W) type hardware" which they calculate as 11,390 tons CO2eq. I believe that's equivalent to around 20 fully loaded passenger flights from New York to London (at ~550 tons per flight).

# 6th December 2024, 6:30 pm / meta, generative-ai, llama, training-data, ai, edge-llms, llms, ollama

Ollama: Llama 3.2 Vision. Ollama released version 0.4 last week with support for Meta's first Llama vision model, Llama 3.2.

If you have Ollama installed you can fetch the 11B model (7.9 GB) like this:

ollama pull llama3.2-vision

Or the larger 90B model (55GB download, likely needs ~88GB of RAM) like this:

ollama pull llama3.2-vision:90b

I was delighted to learn that Sukhbinder Singh had already contributed support for LLM attachments to Sergey Alexandrov's llm-ollama plugin, which means the following works once you've pulled the models:

llm install --upgrade llm-ollama
llm -m llama3.2-vision:latest 'describe' \
  -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/pelican.jpg

This image features a brown pelican standing on rocks, facing the camera and positioned to the left of center. The bird's long beak is a light brown color with a darker tip, while its white neck is adorned with gray feathers that continue down to its body. Its legs are also gray.

In the background, out-of-focus boats and water are visible, providing context for the pelican's environment.

See above description - it's a pelican photo

That's not a bad description of this image, especially for a 7.9GB model that runs happily on my MacBook Pro.

# 13th November 2024, 1:55 am / vision-llms, llm, llama, ai, edge-llms, llms, meta, ollama, generative-ai

Nous Hermes 3. The Nous Hermes family of fine-tuned models have a solid reputation. Their most recent release came out in August, based on Meta's Llama 3.1:

Our training data aggressively encourages the model to follow the system and instruction prompts exactly and in an adaptive manner. Hermes 3 was created by fine-tuning Llama 3.1 8B, 70B and 405B, and training on a dataset of primarily synthetically generated responses. The model boasts comparable and superior performance to Llama 3.1 while unlocking deeper capabilities in reasoning and creativity.

The model weights are on Hugging Face, including GGUF versions of the 70B and 8B models. Here's how to try the 8B model (a 4.58GB download) using the llm-gguf plugin:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf download-model 'https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B-GGUF/resolve/main/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B.Q4_K_M.gguf' -a Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B
llm -m Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B 'hello in spanish'

Nous Research partnered with Lambda Labs to provide inference APIs. It turns out Lambda host quite a few models now, currently providing free inference to users with an API key.

I just released the first alpha of a llm-lambda-labs plugin. You can use that to try the larger 405b model (very hard to run on a consumer device) like this:

llm install llm-lambda-labs
llm keys set lambdalabs
# Paste key here
llm -m lambdalabs/hermes3-405b 'short poem about a pelican with a twist'

Here's the source code for the new plugin, which I based on llm-mistral. The plugin uses httpx-sse to consume the stream of tokens from the API.

# 4th November 2024, 6:20 pm / llm, generative-ai, llama, ai, edge-llms, llms, meta, projects, nous-research

Cerebras Coder (via) Val Town founder Steve Krouse has been building demos on top of the Cerebras API that runs Llama3.1-70b at 2,000 tokens/second.

Having a capable LLM with that kind of performance turns out to be really interesting. Cerebras Coder is a demo that implements Claude Artifact-style on-demand JavaScript apps, and having it run at that speed means changes you request are visible within less than a second:

Steve's implementation (created with the help of Townie, the Val Town code assistant) demonstrates the simplest possible version of an iframe sandbox:

<iframe
    srcDoc={code}
    sandbox="allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-top-navigation allow-downloads allow-presentation allow-pointer-lock"
/>

Where code is populated by a setCode(...) call inside a React component.

The most interesting applications of LLMs continue to be where they operate in a tight loop with a human - this can make those review loops potentially much faster and more productive.

# 31st October 2024, 10:39 pm / val-town, llms, react, iframes, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, sandboxing, ai, steve-krouse, llama, cerebras

Pelicans on a bicycle. I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle?

I chose that because a) I like pelicans and b) I'm pretty sure there aren't any pelican on a bicycle SVG files floating around (yet) that might have already been sucked into the training data.

My prompt:

Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

I've run it through 16 models so far - from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini and Meta (Llama running on Cerebras), all using my LLM CLI utility. Here's my (Claude assisted) Bash script: generate-svgs.sh

Here's Claude 3.5 Sonnet (2024-06-20) and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (2024-10-22):

Gemini 1.5 Flash 001 and Gemini 1.5 Flash 002:

GPT-4o mini and GPT-4o:

o1-mini and o1-preview:

Cerebras Llama 3.1 70B and Llama 3.1 8B:

And a special mention for Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B:

The rest of them are linked from the README.

# 25th October 2024, 11:56 pm / gemini, anthropic, llama, openai, ai, llms, svg, generative-ai, llm, cerebras, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

Running Llama 3.2 Vision and Phi-3.5 Vision on a Mac with mistral.rs

Visit Running Llama 3.2 Vision and Phi-3.5 Vision on a Mac with mistral.rs

mistral.rs is an LLM inference library written in Rust by Eric Buehler. Today I figured out how to use it to run the Llama 3.2 Vision and Phi-3.5 Vision models on my Mac.

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llama-3.2-webgpu (via) Llama 3.2 1B is a really interesting models, given its 128,000 token input and its tiny size (barely more than a GB).

This page loads a 1.24GB q4f16 ONNX build of the Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct model and runs it with a React-powered chat interface directly in the browser, using Transformers.js and WebGPU. Source code for the demo is here.

It worked for me just now in Chrome; in Firefox and Safari I got a “WebGPU is not supported by this browser” error message.

# 30th September 2024, 4:27 pm / webassembly, webgpu, generative-ai, llama, ai, transformers-js, llms

Llama 3.2. In further evidence that AI labs are terrible at naming things, Llama 3.2 is a huge upgrade to the Llama 3 series - they've released their first multi-modal vision models!

Today, we’re releasing Llama 3.2, which includes small and medium-sized vision LLMs (11B and 90B), and lightweight, text-only models (1B and 3B) that fit onto edge and mobile devices, including pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions.

The 1B and 3B text-only models are exciting too, with a 128,000 token context length and optimized for edge devices (Qualcomm and MediaTek hardware get called out specifically).

Meta partnered directly with Ollama to help with distribution, here's the Ollama blog post. They only support the two smaller text-only models at the moment - this command will get the 3B model (2GB):

ollama run llama3.2

And for the 1B model (a 1.3GB download):

ollama run llama3.2:1b

I had to first upgrade my Ollama by clicking on the icon in my macOS task tray and selecting "Restart to update".

The two vision models are coming to Ollama "very soon".

Once you have fetched the Ollama model you can access it from my LLM command-line tool like this:

pipx install llm
llm install llm-ollama
llm chat -m llama3.2:1b

I tried running my djp codebase through that tiny 1B model just now and got a surprisingly good result - by no means comprehensive, but way better than I would ever expect from a model of that size:

files-to-prompt **/*.py -c | llm -m llama3.2:1b --system 'describe this code'

Here's a portion of the output:

The first section defines several test functions using the @djp.hookimpl decorator from the djp library. These hook implementations allow you to intercept and manipulate Django's behavior.

  • test_middleware_order: This function checks that the middleware order is correct by comparing the MIDDLEWARE setting with a predefined list.
  • test_middleware: This function tests various aspects of middleware:
  • It retrieves the response from the URL /from-plugin/ using the Client object, which simulates a request to this view.
  • It checks that certain values are present in the response:
    • X-DJP-Middleware-After
    • X-DJP-Middleware
    • X-DJP-Middleware-Before [...]

I found the GGUF file that had been downloaded by Ollama in my ~/.ollama/models/blobs directory. The following command let me run that model directly in LLM using the llm-gguf plugin:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf register-model ~/.ollama/models/blobs/sha256-74701a8c35f6c8d9a4b91f3f3497643001d63e0c7a84e085bed452548fa88d45 -a llama321b
llm chat -m llama321b

Meta themselves claim impressive performance against other existing models:

Our evaluation suggests that the Llama 3.2 vision models are competitive with leading foundation models, Claude 3 Haiku and GPT4o-mini on image recognition and a range of visual understanding tasks. The 3B model outperforms the Gemma 2 2.6B and Phi 3.5-mini models on tasks such as following instructions, summarization, prompt rewriting, and tool-use, while the 1B is competitive with Gemma.

Here's the Llama 3.2 collection on Hugging Face. You need to accept the new Llama 3.2 Community License Agreement there in order to download those models.

You can try the four new models out via the Chatbot Arena - navigate to "Direct Chat" there and select them from the dropdown menu. You can upload images directly to the chat there to try out the vision features.

llama-3.2-vision-90b-instruct  A photo of two capybaras  Prompt: Describe this photo in detail  The image depicts two capybaras standing in a body of water, with one positioned on the edge of a metal grate. The capybara on the right is partially submerged in the water, while the other is standing on the grate.  Key Features:      Capybaras: Two capybaras are visible in the image.     Water: The capybaras are standing in a body of water, which appears to be murky or dirty.     Metal Grate: A metal grate is visible at the bottom right of the image, with one capybara standing on it.     Background: The background of the image is not clearly visible due to the presence of the water and the capybaras.

# 25th September 2024, 8:28 pm / meta, vision-llms, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms, ollama, edge-llms

Cerebras Inference: AI at Instant Speed (via) New hosted API for Llama running at absurdly high speeds: "1,800 tokens per second for Llama3.1 8B and 450 tokens per second for Llama3.1 70B".

How are they running so fast? Custom hardware. Their WSE-3 is 57x physically larger than an NVIDIA H100, and has 4 trillion transistors, 900,000 cores and 44GB of memory all on one enormous chip.

Their live chat demo just returned me a response at 1,833 tokens/second. Their API currently has a waitlist.

# 28th August 2024, 4:14 am / performance, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms, cerebras

One interesting observation is the impact of environmental factors on training performance at scale. For Llama 3 405B , we noted a diurnal 1-2% throughput variation based on time-of-day. This fluctuation is the result of higher mid-day temperatures impacting GPU dynamic voltage and frequency scaling.

During training, tens of thousands of GPUs may increase or decrease power consumption at the same time, for example, due to all GPUs waiting for checkpointing or collective communications to finish, or the startup or shutdown of the entire training job. When this happens, it can result in instant fluctuations of power consumption across the data center on the order of tens of megawatts, stretching the limits of the power grid. This is an ongoing challenge for us as we scale training for future, even larger Llama models.

The Llama 3 Herd of Models

# 23rd July 2024, 11:26 pm / meta, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms, gpus

llm-gguf. I just released a new alpha plugin for LLM which adds support for running models from Meta's new Llama 3.1 family that have been packaged as GGUF files - it should work for other GGUF chat models too.

If you've already installed LLM the following set of commands should get you setup with Llama 3.1 8B:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf download-model \
  https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Q4_K_M.gguf \
  --alias llama-3.1-8b-instruct --alias l31i

This will download a 4.92GB GGUF from lmstudio-community/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-GGUF on Hugging Face and save it (at least on macOS) to your ~/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/gguf/models folder.

Once installed like that, you can run prompts through the model like so:

llm -m l31i "five great names for a pet lemur"

Or use the llm chat command to keep the model resident in memory and run an interactive chat session with it:

llm chat -m l31i

I decided to ship a new alpha plugin rather than update my existing llm-llama-cpp plugin because that older plugin has some design decisions baked in from the Llama 2 release which no longer make sense, and having a fresh plugin gave me a fresh slate to adopt the latest features from the excellent underlying llama-cpp-python library by Andrei Betlen.

# 23rd July 2024, 10:18 pm / meta, llm, generative-ai, llama, projects, ai, llms

I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source, and I expect that approach to only grow from here.

Mark Zuckerberg

# 23rd July 2024, 4:52 pm / meta, open-source, generative-ai, facebook, mark-zuckerberg, ai, llms, llama

Introducing Llama 3.1: Our most capable models to date. We've been waiting for the largest release of the Llama 3 model for a few months, and now we're getting a whole new model family instead.

Meta are calling Llama 3.1 405B "the first frontier-level open source AI model" and it really is benchmarking in that GPT-4+ class, competitive with both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

I'm equally excited by the new 8B and 70B 3.1 models - both of which now support a 128,000 token context and benchmark significantly higher than their Llama 3 equivalents. Same-sized models getting more powerful and capable a very reassuring trend. I expect the 8B model (or variants of it) to run comfortably on an array of consumer hardware, and I've run a 70B model on a 64GB M2 in the past.

The 405B model can at least be run on a single server-class node:

To support large-scale production inference for a model at the scale of the 405B, we quantized our models from 16-bit (BF16) to 8-bit (FP8) numerics, effectively lowering the compute requirements needed and allowing the model to run within a single server node.

Meta also made a significant change to the license:

We’ve also updated our license to allow developers to use the outputs from Llama models — including 405B — to improve other models for the first time.

We’re excited about how this will enable new advancements in the field through synthetic data generation and model distillation workflows, capabilities that have never been achieved at this scale in open source.

I'm really pleased to see this. Using models to help improve other models has been a crucial technique in LLM research for over a year now, especially for fine-tuned community models release on Hugging Face. Researchers have mostly been ignoring this restriction, so it's reassuring to see the uncertainty around that finally cleared up.

Lots more details about the new models in the paper The Llama 3 Herd of Models including this somewhat opaque note about the 15 trillion token training data:

Our final data mix contains roughly 50% of tokens corresponding to general knowledge, 25% of mathematical and reasoning tokens, 17% code tokens, and 8% multilingual tokens.

Update: I got the Llama 3.1 8B Instruct model working with my LLM tool via a new plugin, llm-gguf.

# 23rd July 2024, 3:40 pm / facebook, llama, ai, llms, meta

Ultravox (via) Ultravox is "a multimodal Speech LLM built around a pretrained Whisper and Llama 3 backbone". It's effectively an openly licensed version of half of the GPT-4o model OpenAI demoed (but did not fully release) a few weeks ago: Ultravox is multimodal for audio input, but still relies on a separate text-to-speech engine for audio output.

You can try it out directly in your browser through this page on AI.TOWN - hit the "Call" button to start an in-browser voice conversation with the model.

I found the demo extremely impressive - really low latency and it was fun and engaging to talk to. Try saying "pretend to be a wise and sarcastic old fox" to kick it into a different personality.

The GitHub repo includes code for both training and inference, and the full model is available from Hugging Face - about 30GB of .safetensors files.

Ultravox says it's licensed under MIT, but I would expect it to also have to inherit aspects of the Llama 3 license since it uses that as a base model.

# 10th June 2024, 5:34 am / generative-ai, llama, text-to-speech, ai, edge-llms, llms

Llama 3 prompt formats (via) I’m often frustrated at how thin the documentation around the prompt format required by an LLM can be.

Llama 3 turns out to be the best example I’ve seen yet of clear prompt format documentation. Every model needs documentation this good!

# 1st May 2024, 6:32 pm / llama, llms, ai, generative-ai

Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM

Visit Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM

Llama 3 was released on Thursday. Early indications are that it’s now the best available openly licensed model—Llama 3 70b Instruct has taken joint 5th place on the LMSYS arena leaderboard, behind only Claude 3 Opus and some GPT-4s and sharing 5th place with Gemini Pro and Claude 3 Sonnet. But unlike those other models Llama 3 70b is weights available and can even be run on a (high end) laptop!

[... 1,962 words]

llm-gpt4all. New release of my LLM plugin which builds on Nomic's excellent gpt4all Python library. I've upgraded to their latest version which adds support for Llama 3 8B Instruct, so after a 4.4GB model download this works:

llm -m Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct "say hi in Spanish"

# 20th April 2024, 5:58 pm / nomic, llm, plugins, projects, generative-ai, ai, llms, llama, edge-llms

Andrej Karpathy’s Llama 3 review. The most interesting coverage I’ve seen so far of Meta’s Llama 3 models (8b and 70b so far, 400b promised later).

Andrej notes that Llama 3 trained on 15 trillion tokens—up from 2 trillion for Llama 2—and they used that many even for the smaller 8b model, 75x more than the chinchilla scaling laws would suggest.

The tokenizer has also changed—they now use 128,000 tokens, up from 32,000. This results in a 15% drop in the tokens needed to represent a string of text.

The one disappointment is the context length—just 8,192, 2x that of Llama 2 and 4x LLaMA 1 but still pretty small by today’s standards.

If early indications hold, the 400b model could be the first genuinely GPT-4 class openly licensed model. We’ll have to wait and see.

# 18th April 2024, 8:50 pm / andrej-karpathy, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms

GGML GGUF File Format Vulnerabilities. The GGML and GGUF formats are used by llama.cpp to package and distribute model weights.

Neil Archibald: “The GGML library performs insufficient validation on the input file and, therefore, contains a selection of potentially exploitable memory corruption vulnerabilities during parsing.”

These vulnerabilities were shared with the library authors on 23rd January and patches landed on the 29th.

If you have a llama.cpp or llama-cpp-python installation that’s more than a month old you should upgrade ASAP.

# 26th March 2024, 6:47 am / security, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms

GGUF, the long way around (via) Vicki Boykis dives deep into the GGUF format used by llama.cpp, after starting with a detailed description of how PyTorch models work and how they are traditionally persisted using Python pickle.

Pickle lead to safetensors, a format that avoided the security problems with downloading and running untrusted pickle files.

Llama.cpp introduced GGML, which popularized 16-bit (as opposed to 32-bit) quantization and bundled metadata and tensor data in a single file.

GGUF fixed some design flaws in GGML and is the default format used by Llama.cpp today.

# 29th February 2024, 9:39 pm / vicki-boykis, generative-ai, llama, pytorch, ai, llms

2023

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

Visit 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.

[... 650 words]

This is nonsensical. There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs’ books.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria

# 26th November 2023, 4:13 am / ethics, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms

A Hackers’ Guide to Language Models. Jeremy Howard’s new 1.5 hour YouTube introduction to language models looks like a really useful place to catch up if you’re an experienced Python programmer looking to start experimenting with LLMs. He covers what they are and how they work, then shows how to build against the OpenAI API, build a Code Interpreter clone using OpenAI functions, run models from Hugging Face on your own machine (with NVIDIA cards or on a Mac) and finishes with a demo of fine-tuning a Llama 2 model to perform text-to-SQL using an open dataset.

# 25th September 2023, 12:24 am / llms, ai, jeremy-howard, generative-ai, python, llama, openai, fine-tuning, nvidia

A practical guide to deploying Large Language Models Cheap, Good *and* Fast. Joel Kang’s extremely comprehensive notes on what he learned trying to run Vicuna-13B-v1.5 on an affordable cloud GPU server (a T4 at $0.615/hour). The space is in so much flux right now—Joel ended up using MLC but the best option could change any minute.

Vicuna 13B quantized to 4-bit integers needed 7.5GB of the T4’s 16GB of VRAM, and returned tokens at 20/second.

An open challenge running MLC right now is around batching and concurrency: “I did try making 3 concurrent requests to the endpoint, and while they all stream tokens back and the server doesn’t OOM, the output of all 3 streams seem to actually belong to a single prompt.”

# 4th September 2023, 1:43 pm / mlc, llms, ai, generative-ai, llama, vicuna

WebLLM supports Llama 2 70B now. The WebLLM project from MLC uses WebGPU to run large language models entirely in the browser. They recently added support for Llama 2, including Llama 2 70B, the largest and most powerful model in that family.

To my astonishment, this worked! I used a M2 Mac with 64GB of RAM and Chrome Canary and it downloaded many GBs of data... but it worked, and spat out tokens at a slow but respectable rate of 3.25 tokens/second.

# 30th August 2023, 2:41 pm / webassembly, generative-ai, llama, mlc, ai, llms, webgpu

Llama 2 is about as factually accurate as GPT-4 for summaries and is 30X cheaper. Anyscale offer (cheap, fast) API access to Llama 2, so they’re not an unbiased source of information—but I really hope their claim here that Llama 2 70B provides almost equivalent summarization quality to GPT-4 holds up. Summarization is one of my favourite applications of LLMs, partly because it’s key to being able to implement Retrieval Augmented Generation against your own documents—where snippets of relevant documents are fed to the model and used to answer a user’s question. Having a really high performance openly licensed summarization model is a very big deal.

# 30th August 2023, 2:37 pm / generative-ai, llama, gpt-4, ai, llms, rag

Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding (via) New LLMs from Meta built on top of Llama 2, in three shapes: a foundation Code Llama model, Code Llama Python that’s specialized for Python, and a Code Llama Instruct model fine-tuned for understanding natural language instructions.

# 24th August 2023, 5:54 pm / llama, llms, ai, generative-ai, fine-tuning, meta

I apologize, but I cannot provide an explanation for why the Montagues and Capulets are beefing in Romeo and Juliet as it goes against ethical and moral standards, and promotes negative stereotypes and discrimination.

Llama 2 7B

# 20th August 2023, 5:38 am / llms, ai, ethics, generative-ai, llama

llama.cpp surprised many people (myself included) with how quickly you can run large LLMs on small computers [...] TLDR at batch_size=1 (i.e. just generating a single stream of prediction on your computer), the inference is super duper memory-bound. The on-chip compute units are twiddling their thumbs while sucking model weights through a straw from DRAM. [...] A100: 1935 GB/s memory bandwidth, 1248 TOPS. MacBook M2: 100 GB/s, 7 TFLOPS. The compute is ~200X but the memory bandwidth only ~20X. So the little M2 chip that could will only be about ~20X slower than a mighty A100.

Andrej Karpathy

# 16th August 2023, 4:13 am / andrej-karpathy, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms