39 posts tagged “mistral”
Mistral AI release both openly licensed and API-hosted Language Models.
2024
The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken
Four weeks ago, GPT-4 remained the undisputed champion: consistently at the top of every key benchmark, but more importantly the clear winner in terms of “vibes”. Almost everyone investing serious time exploring LLMs agreed that it was the most capable default model for the majority of tasks—and had been for more than a year.
[... 717 words]Mistral Large. Mistral Medium only came out two months ago, and now it’s followed by Mistral Large. Like Medium, this new model is currently only available via their API. It scores well on benchmarks (though not quite as well as GPT-4) but the really exciting feature is function support, clearly based on OpenAI’s own function design.
Functions are now supported via the Mistral API for both Mistral Large and the new Mistral Small, described as follows: “Mistral Small, optimised for latency and cost. Mistral Small outperforms Mixtral 8x7B and has lower latency, which makes it a refined intermediary solution between our open-weight offering and our flagship model.”
Representation Engineering: Mistral-7B on Acid (via) Theia Vogel provides a delightfully clear explanation (and worked examples) of control vectors—a relatively recent technique for influencing the behaviour of an LLM by applying vectors to the hidden states that are evaluated during model inference.
These vectors are surprisingly easy to both create and apply. Build a small set of contrasting prompt pairs—“Act extremely happy” v.s. “Act extremely sad” for example (with a tiny bit of additional boilerplate), then run a bunch of those prompts and collect the hidden layer states. Then use “single-component PCA” on those states to get a control vector representing the difference.
The examples Theia provides, using control vectors to make Mistral 7B more or less honest, trippy, lazy, creative and more, are very convincing.
Mixtral of Experts. The Mixtral paper is out, exactly a month after the release of the Mixtral 8x7B model itself. Thanks to the paper I now have a reasonable understanding of how a mixture of experts model works: each layer has 8 available blocks, but a router model selects two out of those eight for each token passing through that layer and combines their output. “As a result, each token has access to 47B parameters, but only uses 13B active parameters during inference.”
The Mixtral token context size is an impressive 32k, and it compares extremely well against the much larger Llama 70B across a whole array of benchmarks.
Unsurprising but disappointing: there’s nothing in the paper at all about what it was trained on.
2023
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.
[... 2,063 words]Mixtral of experts (via) Mistral have firmly established themselves as the most exciting AI lab outside of OpenAI, arguably more exciting because much of their work is released under open licenses.
On December 8th they tweeted a link to a torrent, with no additional context (a neat marketing trick they’ve used in the past). The 87GB torrent contained a new model, Mixtral-8x7b-32kseqlen—a Mixture of Experts.
Three days later they published a full write-up, describing “Mixtral 8x7B, a high-quality sparse mixture of experts model (SMoE) with open weights”—licensed Apache 2.0.
They claim “Mixtral outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference”—and that it outperforms GPT-3.5 on most benchmarks too.
This isn’t even their current best model. The new Mistral API platform (currently on a waitlist) refers to Mixtral as “Mistral-small” (and their previous 7B model as “Mistral-tiny”—and also provides access to a currently closed model, “Mistral-medium”, which they claim to be competitive with GPT-4.
llamafile is the new best way to run an 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]MonadGPT (via) “What would have happened if ChatGPT was invented in the 17th century? MonadGPT is a possible answer.
MonadGPT is a finetune of Mistral-Hermes 2 on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French and Latin, mostly coming from EEBO and Gallica.
Like the original Mistral-Hermes, MonadGPT can be used in conversation mode. It will not only answer in an historical language and style but will use historical and dated references.”
The EU AI Act now proposes to regulate “foundational models”, i.e. the engine behind some AI applications. We cannot regulate an engine devoid of usage. We don’t regulate the C language because one can use it to develop malware. Instead, we ban malware and strengthen network systems (we regulate usage). Foundational language models provide a higher level of abstraction than the C language for programming computer systems; nothing in their behaviour justifies a change in the regulatory framework.
— Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI