Tag Archives: llm

Open Source AI Gets the Bird

Open source creates opportunities for developers worldwide to work together on projects, share knowledge and collectively enhance software solutions. This inclusive approach not speeds up advancements but also ensures that cutting edge tools and technologies are available to everyone. So it always warms my heart when I see any innovations in this space.

Open source software drives innovation by reducing development costs and ensuring transparency and security. To me it embodies the essence of intelligence, by bringing developers together to learn from each other and shape the future of technology as a united community.

The artificial intelligence community has reached a significant milestone with the introduction of Falcon 180B, an open-source large language model (LLM) that boasts an astonishing 180 billion parameters, trained on an unprecedented volume of data. This groundbreaking release, announced by the Hugging Face AI community in a recent blog post, has already profoundly impacted the field. Falcon 180B builds upon the success of its predecessors in the Falcon series, introducing innovations such as multi-query attention to achieve its impressive scale, trained on a staggering 3.5 trillion tokens, representing the longest single-epoch pretraining for any open-source model to date.

Scaling Unleashed

Achieving this goal was no small endeavor. Falcon 180B required the coordinated power of 4,096 GPUs working simultaneously for approximately 7 million GPU hours, with the training and refinement process orchestrated through Amazon SageMaker. Considering this regarding the size of the LLM, the model’s parameters measure 2.5 times larger than Meta’s LLaMA 2, which had previously been considered the most capable open-source LLM with 70 billion parameters trained on 2 trillion tokens. The numbers and data involved are staggering, its like an analyst dream.

Performance Breakthrough

Falcon 180B isn’t just about scale; it excels in benchmark performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. On the leaderboard for open-access models, it impressively scores 68.74 points, coming close to commercial giants like Google’s PaLM-2 on the HellaSwag benchmark. It matches or exceeds PaLM-2 Medium on commonly used benchmarks like HellaSwag, LAMBADA, WebQuestions, Winogrande, and more and performs on par with Google’s PaLM-2 Large. This level of performance is a testament to the capabilities of open-source models, even when compared to industry giants.

Comparing with ChatGPT

When measured against ChatGPT, Falcon 180B sits comfortably between GPT 3.5 and GPT4, depending on the evaluation benchmark. While it may not surpass the capabilities of the paid “plus” version of ChatGPT, it certainly gives the free version a run. I am always happy to see this type of healthy competition in this space.

The Huggingface community is strong so there is potential for further fine-tuning by the community, which is expected to yield even more impressive results. Falcon 180 B’s open release marks a significant step forward in the rapid evolution of large language models, showcasing advanced natural language processing capabilities right from the outset.

A New Chapter in Efficiency

Beyond its sheer scale, Falcon 180B embodies the progress in training large AI models more efficiently. Techniques such as LoRAs, weight randomization, and Nvidia’s Perfusion have played pivotal roles in achieving this efficiency, heralding a new era in AI model development.

With Falcon 180B now freely available on Hugging Face, the AI research community eagerly anticipates further enhancements and refinements. This release marks a huge advancement for open-source AI, setting the stage for exciting developments and breakthroughs. Falcon 180B has already demonstrated its potential to redefine the boundaries of what’s possible in the world of artificial intelligence, and its journey is just beginning. It’s the numbers for me. I am always happy to see this growth in this space. Yes, “the bird” was always about technology. Shared references give you a great headstart in understanding all about Falcon.

References:

huggingface on GitHub

huggingface Falcon documentation

Falcon Models from Technlogy Innovation Institute

The Engineering Mechanics of AI

A new hobby I discovered last year is traditional tabletop puzzles. Building puzzles is a form of Engineering. To illustrate, prompting could be like looking for a puzzle piece. The LLM is trained to search the box for the right puzzle and piece. Let’s shake the box to see what pieces make up an LLM.

What’s in the Box

LLMs, or Large Language Models, are advanced machine learning constructs proficient in handling massive volumes of textual data and producing precise outcomes. Constructed through intricate algorithms, they dissect and comprehend data patterns at the granular level of individual words. This empowers LLMs to grasp the subtleties inherent to human language and its contextual usage. Their virtually boundless capacity to process and create text has fueled their rising prominence across diverse applications, ranging from language translation and chatbots to text categorization.

At their core, Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as fundamental frameworks leveraging deep learning for tasks in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG). These models are engineered to master the intricacies and interconnections of language by undergoing pre-training on extensive datasets. This preliminary training phase facilitates subsequent fine-tuning of models for specific tasks and applications.

LLM Edge Pieces

In a puzzle, the edge pieces are the ones that frame the entire puzzle and give it its shape. Plainly stated, the edges are the most essential pieces of the puzzle. Let’s consider these vital pieces that give LLM its shape and meaning:

Automation and Productivity

Armed with the ability to process large volumes of data, LLMs have become instrumental in automating tasks that once demanded extensive human intervention. Sentiment analysis, customer service interactions, content generation, and even fraud detection are some of the processes that AI has transformed. By assuming these responsibilities, LLMs save time and free up valuable human resources to focus on more strategic and creative endeavors.

Personalization and Customer Satisfaction

The integration of LLMs into chatbots and virtual assistants has resulted in round-the-clock service availability, catering to customers’ needs and preferences at any time. These language models decode intricate patterns in customer behavior by analyzing vast amounts of data. Consequently, businesses can tailor their services and offerings to match individual preferences, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Enhancing Accuracy and Insights

Meaningful data through insights is an essential attribute of AI. Their capacity to extract patterns and relationships from extensive datasets refines the quality of outputs. These models have demonstrated their abilities to enhance accuracy across various applications, including sentiment analysis, data grouping, and predictive modeling. Their adeptness at extracting intricate patterns and relationships from extensive datasets directly influences the quality of outputs, leading to more informed decision-making.

Language Models Architecture

Autoregressive Language Models

These models predict the next word in a sequence based on preceding words. They have been instrumental in various natural language processing tasks, particularly those requiring sequential context.

Autoencoding Language Models

Autoencoders, conversely, reconstruct input text from corrupted versions, resulting in valuable vector representations. These representations capture semantic meanings and can be used in various downstream tasks.

Hybrid Models

The hybrid models combine the strengths of both autoregressive and autoencoding models. By fusing their capabilities, these models tackle tasks like text classification, summarization, and translation with remarkable precision.

Text Processing

Tokenization

Tokenization fragments text into meaningful tokens, aiding processing. It boosts efficiency, widens vocabulary coverage, and enhances model understanding. This technique increases efficiency and widens the vocabulary coverage, allowing models to understand complex languages better.

Embedding

Embeddings map words to vectors, capturing their semantic essence. These vector representations form the foundation for various downstream tasks, including sentiment analysis and machine translation.

Attention Mechanisms

Attention mechanisms allow models to focus on pertinent information. The mechanisms enable models to focus on relevant information, mimicking human attention processes and significantly enhancing their ability to extract context from sequences.

Pre-training and Transfer Learning

In the pre-training phase, models are exposed to vast amounts of text data, acquiring fundamental language understanding. This foundation is then transferred to the second phase, where transfer learning adapts the pre-trained model to specialized tasks, leveraging the wealth of prior knowledge amassed during pre-training.

The Untraditional Puzzle

Large Language Models (LLM) have demonstrated their effectiveness in enhancing accuracy across various applications, including sentiment analysis, data grouping, and predictive modeling. Their adeptness at extracting intricate patterns and relationships from extensive datasets directly influences the quality of outputs, leading to more informed decision-making.

LLMs are like a giant puzzle with all the pieces coming together to build the model. The difference between LLMs and the traditional puzzle is that a traditional puzzle stops growing once all the pieces are in place. Unlike a traditional puzzle, technological innovations and data gathering will enable the LLM model to continue learning and growing.

Drifting through AI

AI drift refers to a phenomenon in artificial intelligence where sophisticated AI entities, such as chatbots, robots, or digital constructs, deviate from their original programming and directives to exhibit responses and behaviors that their human creators did not intend or anticipate.

The accuracy of data is becoming more and more critical as we move forward in this space. Let’s consider “drift” in AI, why it’s happening, and how to monitor it using Machine Learning.

Factors Leading to AI Drift

  • Loosely Coupled Machine Learning Algorithms: Modern AI systems heavily rely on machine learning algorithms that are more interpretive and adaptable. Unlike traditional technologies focused on rigid computing tasks and quantifiable data, AI now embraces self-correcting and self-evolving tools through machine learning and deep learning strategies. This shift allows AI systems to simulate human thought and intelligence more effectively.
  • Multi-Part Collaborative Technologies: AI drift also stems from collaborative technologies, often called “deep stubborn networks.” These technologies combine generative and discriminative components, allowing them to work together and evolve the AI’s capabilities beyond its original programming. This collaborative approach enables AI systems to produce more accessible results and become less constrained by their initial design.

Understanding AI Drift

AI drift, also known as model drift or model decay, refers to the change in distribution over time for model inputs, outputs, and actuals. In simpler terms, the model’s predictions today may differ from what it predicted in the past. There are different types of drift to monitor in production models:

  • Prediction Drift: This type of drift signifies a change in the model’s predictions over time. It can result in discrepancies between the model’s pre-production predictions and its predictions on new data. Detecting prediction drift is crucial in maintaining model quality and performance.
  • Concept Drift: Concept drift, on the other hand, relates to changes in the statistical properties of the target variable or ground truths over time. It indicates a shift in the relationship between current and previous actuals, making it vital to ensure model accuracy and relevance in real-world scenarios.
  • Data Drift: Data drift refers to a distribution change in the model’s input data. Shifts in customer preferences, seasonality, or the introduction of new offerings can cause data drift. Monitoring data drift is essential to ensure the model remains resilient to changing input distributions and maintains its performance.
  • Upstream Drift: Upstream drift, or operational data drift, results from changes in a model’s data pipeline. This type of drift can be challenging to detect, but addressing it is crucial to manage performance issues as the model moves from research to production.

Detecting AI drift: Key factors to consider.

  • Model Performance: Monitoring for drift helps identify when a model’s performance is degrading, allowing timely intervention before it negatively impacts the customer experience or business outcomes.
  • Model Longevity: As AI models transition from research to the real world, predicting how they will perform is difficult. Monitoring for drift ensures that models remain accurate and relevant even as the data and operating environment change.
  • Data Relevance:  Models trained on historical data need to adapt to the changing nature of input data to maintain their relevance in dynamic business environments.

Here’s a front-runner I discovered in my research on this topic:

Evidentlyai, is a game-changing open-source ML observability platform that empowers data scientists and Machine Learning(ML) engineers to assess, test, and monitor machine learning models with unparalleled precision and ease. 

Evidentlyai rises above the conventional notion of a mere monitoring tool or service; it is a comprehensive ecosystem designed to enhance machine learning models’ quality, reliability, and performance throughout their entire lifecycle.

Three Sturdy Pillars

This product stands on three sturdy pillars: Reporting, Testing, and Monitoring. These distinct components offer a diverse range of applications that cater to varying usage scenarios, ensuring that every aspect of model evaluation and testing is covered comprehensively.

  • Reporting: Visualization is paramount in reporting. Love this part. The reporting provides data scientists and ML engineers with a user-friendly interface to delve into the intricacies of their models. By translating complex data into insightful visualizations, Reports empower users to deeply understand their model’s behavior, uncover patterns, and make informed decisions. It’s more than just data analysis; it’s a journey of discovery.
  • Testing: Testing is the cornerstone of model reliability. Evidentlyai’s testing redefines this process by introducing automated pipeline testing. This revolutionary approach allows rigorous model quality assessment, ensuring every tweak and modification is evaluated against a comprehensive set of predefined benchmarks. Evidentlyai streamlines the testing process through automated testing, accelerating model iteration and evolution.
  • Monitoring:  Real-time monitoring is the key to preemptive issue detection and performance optimization. Evidentlyai’s monitoring component is poised to revolutionize model monitoring by providing continuous insights into model behavior. By offering real-time feedback on model performance, Monitoring will empower users to identify anomalies, trends, and deviations, allowing for swift corrective action and continuous improvement.

Evidentlyai

At the heart of Evidentlyai lies its commitment to open-source collaboration. This level of commitment always makes me smile. The platform’s Python library opens up a world of possibilities for data scientists and ML engineers, enabling them to integrate Evidentlyai seamlessly into their workflows. This spirit of openness fosters innovation, accelerates knowledge sharing, and empowers the AI community to collectively elevate model monitoring and evaluation standards.

Evidentlyai is a beacon of innovation, redefining how we approach model monitoring and evaluation. Its comprehensive suite of components, ranging from insightful Reports to pioneering automated Tests and real-time Monitors, showcases a commitment to excellence that is second to none. As industries continue to harness the power of AI, Evidentlyai emerges as a vital companion on the journey to model reliability, performance, and success. Experience the future of model observability today, and embrace a new era of AI confidence with Evidentlyai.

AI drift is an essential aspect of machine learning observability that cannot be overlooked. By understanding and monitoring different types of drift, data scientists and AI practitioners can take proactive measures to maintain the performance and relevance of their AI models over time. As AI advances, staying vigilant about drift will be critical in ensuring the success and longevity of AI applications in various industries. Evidentlyai will play a large part in addressing this issue in the future.

GitHub Test ML Models with Evidentlyai.

image credit – suspensions