Dr. Raza Habib discusses prompt engineering, prompt ops, and types of human feedback. They also cover building epic companies, the importance of feedback in model development, the speed of iteration in the enterprise, new pricing model for Humanloop, the value of logging data in AI models, hiring needs, impact of OpenAI's fine-tuning rollout, and advancements in AI in Europe.

Guest Youssef Rizk from Wondercraft.ai discusses the impact of AI-generated content and the 'content flippening'. They cover topics such as the features of Wondercraft, the importance of consistency in podcasting, video translation and dubbing, building Wondercraft in one day, and the AI watermarking technology.

Chris Lattner, Product counterpart on Tensorflow, discusses his work on building a unified AI engine and the challenges of AI software. They also talk about the evolution of AI development, the importance of collaboration, and the limitations of current AI systems. They highlight the development of Mojo🔥, its production quality, and investment, as well as George's work on a tensor contraction compiler. They touch upon the benefits of Mojo and its upcoming features, including building a strong community and adding traits to the Mojo language.

The podcast features Harrison Chase, Founder of LangChain, discussing the origins of LangChain and its growth as a popular building block for AI Engineers. They also explore topics such as working with GPT, the vision for Link Smith as a control center for LLM application, reducing hallucinations in language generation models, market share of different models, challenges of working with agents, potential applications of LangChain, and accelerating AI with vision API support.

Eugene Cheah of UIlicious discusses RWKV models as a challenger to Transformers dominance, exploring their scalability, competitive performance, and distributed community. They also cover automating browsers, core pilot extensions, language model composition, and the benefits of an attention-free transform in language models.

Aman Sanger, Co-founder of Anysphere, discusses the development of Cursor.so, an AI-first code editor. They explore the advantages of the cursor over traditional code editors, and the functionality of the custom IDE. They also discuss early access to GPT models, tooling and prompt engineering for code editors, and the challenges of context length in language models.

Quentin Anthony, AI Engineer at Eleuther AI, discusses the mathematics of training LLMs. Topics covered include compute requirements, scaling up GPUs, efficiency of back propagation, theoretical flops versus actual flops, and challenges in training language models.

We have just announced our first set of speakers at AI Engineer Summit! Sign up for the livestream or email sponsors@ai.engineer if you’d like to support.We are facing a massive GPU crunch. As both startups and VC’s hoard Nvidia GPUs like countries count nuclear stockpiles, tweets about GPU shortages have become increasingly common. But what if we could run LLMs with AMD cards, or without a GPU at all? There’s just one weird trick: compilation. And there’s one person uniquely qualified to do it.We had the pleasure to sit down with Tianqi Chen, who’s an Assistant Professor at CMU, where he both teaches the MLC course and runs the MLC group. You might also know him as the creator of XGBoost, Apache TVM, and MXNet, as well as the co-founder of OctoML. The MLC (short for Machine Learning Compilation) group has released a lot of interesting projects:* MLC Chat: an iPhone app that lets you run models like RedPajama-3B and Vicuna-7B on-device. It gets up to 30 tok/s!* Web LLM: Run models like LLaMA-70B in your browser (!!) to offer local inference in your product.* MLC LLM: a framework that allows any language models to be deployed natively on different hardware and software stacks.The MLC group has just announced new support for AMD cards; we previously talked about the shortcomings of ROCm, but using MLC you can get performance very close to the NVIDIA’s counterparts. This is great news for founders and builders, as AMD cards are more readily available. Here are their latest results on AMD’s 7900s vs some of top NVIDIA consumer cards.If you just can’t get a GPU at all, MLC LLM also supports ARM and x86 CPU architectures as targets by leveraging LLVM. While speed performance isn’t comparable, it allows for non-time-sensitive inference to be run on commodity hardware.We also enjoyed getting a peek into TQ’s process, which involves a lot of sketching:With all the other work going on in this space with projects like ggml and Ollama, we’re excited to see GPUs becoming less and less of an issue to get models in the hands of more people, and innovative software solutions to hardware problems!Show Notes* TQ’s Projects:* XGBoost* Apache TVM* MXNet* MLC* OctoML* CMU Catalyst* ONNX* GGML* Mojo* WebLLM* RWKV* HiPPO* Tri Dao’s Episode* George Hotz EpisodePeople:* Carlos Guestrin* Albert GuTimestamps* [00:00:00] Intros* [00:03:41] The creation of XGBoost and its surprising popularity* [00:06:01] Comparing tree-based models vs deep learning* [00:10:33] Overview of TVM and how it works with ONNX* [00:17:18] MLC deep dive* [00:28:10] Using int4 quantization for inference of language models* [00:30:32] Comparison of MLC to other model optimization projects* [00:35:02] Running large language models in the browser with WebLLM* [00:37:47] Integrating browser models into applications* [00:41:15] OctoAI and self-optimizing compute* [00:45:45] Lightning RoundTranscriptAlessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO in Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space. [00:00:20]Swyx: Okay, and we are here with Tianqi Chen, or TQ as people call him, who is assistant professor in ML computer science at CMU, Carnegie Mellon University, also helping to run Catalyst Group, also chief technologist of OctoML. You wear many hats. Are those, you know, your primary identities these days? Of course, of course. [00:00:42]Tianqi: I'm also, you know, very enthusiastic open source. So I'm also a VP and PRC member of the Apache TVM project and so on. But yeah, these are the things I've been up to so far. [00:00:53]Swyx: Yeah. So you did Apache TVM, XGBoost, and MXNet, and we can cover any of those in any amount of detail. But maybe what's one thing about you that people might not learn from your official bio or LinkedIn, you know, on the personal side? [00:01:08]Tianqi: Let me say, yeah, so normally when I do, I really love coding, even though like I'm trying to run all those things. So one thing that I keep a habit on is I try to do sketchbooks. I have a book, like real sketchbooks to draw down the design diagrams and the sketchbooks I keep sketching over the years, and now I have like three or four of them. And it's kind of a usually a fun experience of thinking the design through and also seeing how open source project evolves and also looking back at the sketches that we had in the past to say, you know, all these ideas really turn into code nowadays. [00:01:43]Alessio: How many sketchbooks did you get through to build all this stuff? I mean, if one person alone built one of those projects, he'll be a very accomplished engineer. Like you built like three of these. What's that process like for you? Like it's the sketchbook, like the start, and then you think about the code or like. [00:01:59]Swyx: Yeah. [00:02:00]Tianqi: So, so usually I start sketching on high level architectures and also in a project that works for over years, we also start to think about, you know, new directions, like of course generative AI language model comes in, how it's going to evolve. So normally I would say it takes like one book a year, roughly at that rate. It's usually fun to, I find it's much easier to sketch things out and then gives a more like a high level architectural guide for some of the future items. Yeah. [00:02:28]Swyx: Have you ever published this sketchbooks? Cause I think people would be very interested on, at least on a historical basis. Like this is the time where XGBoost was born, you know? Yeah, not really. [00:02:37]Tianqi: I started sketching like after XGBoost. So that's a kind of missing piece, but a lot of design details in TVM are actually part of the books that I try to keep a record of. [00:02:48]Swyx: Yeah, we'll try to publish them and publish something in the journals. Maybe you can grab a little snapshot for visual aid. Sounds good. [00:02:57]Alessio: Yeah. And yeah, talking about XGBoost, so a lot of people in the audience might know it's a gradient boosting library, probably the most popular out there. And it became super popular because many people started using them in like a machine learning competitions. And I think there's like a whole Wikipedia page of like all state-of-the-art models. They use XGBoost and like, it's a really long list. When you were working on it, so we just had Tri Dao, who's the creator of FlashAttention on the podcast. And I asked him this question, it's like, when you were building FlashAttention, did you know that like almost any transform race model will use it? And so I asked the same question to you when you were coming up with XGBoost, like, could you predict it would be so popular or like, what was the creation process? And when you published it, what did you expect? We have no idea. [00:03:41]Tianqi: Like, actually, the original reason that we built that library is that at that time, deep learning just came out. Like that was the time where AlexNet just came out. And one of the ambitious mission that myself and my advisor, Carlos Guestrin, then is we want to think about, you know, try to test the hypothesis. Can we find alternatives to deep learning models? Because then, you know, there are other alternatives like, you know, support vector machines, linear models, and of course, tree-based models. And our question was, if you build those models and feed them with big enough data, because usually like one of the key characteristics of deep learning is that it's taking a lot [00:04:22]Swyx: of data, right? [00:04:23]Tianqi: So we will be able to get the same amount of performance. That's a hypothesis we're setting out to test. Of course, if you look at now, right, that's a wrong hypothesis, but as a byproduct, what we find out is that, you know, most of the gradient boosting library out there is not efficient enough for us to test that hypothesis. So I happen to have quite a bit of experience in the past of building gradient boosting trees and their variants. So Effective Action Boost was kind of like a byproduct of that hypothesis testing. At that time, I'm also competing a bit in data science challenges, like I worked on KDDCup and then Kaggle kind of become bigger, right? So I kind of think maybe it's becoming useful to others. One of my friends convinced me to try to do a Python binding of it. That tends to be like a very good decision, right, to be effective. Usually when I build it, we feel like maybe a command line interface is okay. And now we have a Python binding, we have R bindings. And then it realized, you know, it started getting interesting. People started contributing different perspectives, like visualization and so on. So we started to push a bit more on to building distributive support to make sure it works on any platform and so on. And even at that time point, when I talked to Carlos, my advisor, later, he said he never anticipated that we'll get to that level of success. And actually, why I pushed for gradient boosting trees, interestingly, at that time, he also disagreed. He thinks that maybe we should go for kernel machines then. And it turns out, you know, actually, we are both wrong in some sense, and Deep Neural Network was the king in the hill. But at least the gradient boosting direction got into something fruitful. [00:06:01]Swyx: Interesting. [00:06:02]Alessio: I'm always curious when it comes to these improvements, like, what's the design process in terms of like coming up with it? And how much of it is a collaborative with like other people that you're working with versus like trying to be, you know, obviously, in academia, it's like very paper-driven kind of research driven. [00:06:19]Tianqi: I would say the extra boost improvement at that time point was more on like, you know, I'm trying to figure out, right. But it's combining lessons. Before that, I did work on some of the other libraries on matrix factorization. That was like my first open source experience. Nobody knew about it, because you'll find, likely, if you go and try to search for the package SVD feature, you'll find some SVN repo somewhere. But it's actually being used for some of the recommender system packages. So I'm trying to apply some of the previous lessons there and trying to combine them. The later projects like MXNet and then TVM is much, much more collaborative in a sense that... But, of course, extra boost has become bigger, right? So when we started that project myself, and then we have, it's really amazing to see people come in. Michael, who was a lawyer, and now he works on the AI space as well, on contributing visualizations. Now we have people from our community contributing different things. So extra boost even today, right, it's a community of committers driving the project. So it's definitely something collaborative and moving forward on getting some of the things continuously improved for our community. [00:07:37]Alessio: Let's talk a bit about TVM too, because we got a lot of things to run through in this episode. [00:07:42]Swyx: I would say that at some point, I'd love to talk about this comparison between extra boost or tree-based type AI or machine learning compared to deep learning, because I think there is a lot of interest around, I guess, merging the two disciplines, right? And we can talk more about that. I don't know where to insert that, by the way, so we can come back to it later. Yeah. [00:08:04]Tianqi: Actually, what I said, when we test the hypothesis, the hypothesis is kind of, I would say it's partially wrong, because the hypothesis we want to test now is, can you run tree-based models on image classification tasks, where deep learning is certainly a no-brainer right [00:08:17]Swyx: now today, right? [00:08:18]Tianqi: But if you try to run it on tabular data, still, you'll find that most people opt for tree-based models. And there's a reason for that, in the sense that when you are looking at tree-based models, the decision boundaries are naturally rules that you're looking at, right? And they also have nice properties, like being able to be agnostic to scale of input and be able to automatically compose features together. And I know there are attempts on building neural network models that work for tabular data, and I also sometimes follow them. I do feel like it's good to have a bit of diversity in the modeling space. Actually, when we're building TVM, we build cost models for the programs, and actually we are using XGBoost for that as well. I still think tree-based models are going to be quite relevant, because first of all, it's really to get it to work out of the box. And also, you will be able to get a bit of interoperability and control monotonicity [00:09:18]Swyx: and so on. [00:09:19]Tianqi: So yes, it's still going to be relevant. I also sometimes keep coming back to think about, are there possible improvements that we can build on top of these models? And definitely, I feel like it's a space that can have some potential in the future. [00:09:34]Swyx: Are there any current projects that you would call out as promising in terms of merging the two directions? [00:09:41]Tianqi: I think there are projects that try to bring a transformer-type model for tabular data. I don't remember specifics of them, but I think even nowadays, if you look at what people are using, tree-based models are still one of their toolkits. So I think maybe eventually it's not even a replacement, it will be just an ensemble of models that you can call. Perfect. [00:10:07]Alessio: Next up, about three years after XGBoost, you built this thing called TVM, which is now a very popular compiler framework for models. Let's talk about, so this came out about at the same time as ONNX. So I think it would be great if you could maybe give a little bit of an overview of how the two things work together. Because it's kind of like the model, then goes to ONNX, then goes to the TVM. But I think a lot of people don't understand the nuances. I can get a bit of a backstory on that. [00:10:33]Tianqi: So actually, that's kind of an ancient history. Before XGBoost, I worked on deep learning for two years or three years. I got a master's before I started my PhD. And during my master's, my thesis focused on applying convolutional restricted Boltzmann machine for ImageNet classification. That is the thing I'm working on. And that was before AlexNet moment. So effectively, I had to handcraft NVIDIA CUDA kernels on, I think, a GTX 2070 card. I have a 22070 card. It took me about six months to get one model working. And eventually, that model is not so good, and we should have picked a better model. But that was like an ancient history that really got me into this deep learning field. And of course, eventually, we find it didn't work out. So in my master's, I ended up working on recommender system, which got me a paper, and I applied and got a PhD. But I always want to come back to work on the deep learning field. So after XGBoost, I think I started to work with some folks on this particular MXNet. At that time, it was like the frameworks of CAFE, Ciano, PyTorch haven't yet come out. And we're really working hard to optimize for performance on GPUs. At that time, I found it's really hard, even for NVIDIA GPU. It took me six months. And then it's amazing to see on different hardwares how hard it is to go and optimize code for the platforms that are interesting. So that gets me thinking, can we build something more generic and automatic? So that I don't need an entire team of so many people to go and build those frameworks. So that's the motivation of starting working on TVM. There is really too little about machine learning engineering needed to support deep learning models on the platforms that we're interested in. I think it started a bit earlier than ONNX, but once it got announced, I think it's in a similar time period at that time. So overall, how it works is that TVM, you will be able to take a subset of machine learning programs that are represented in what we call a computational graph. Nowadays, we can also represent a loop-level program ingest from your machine learning models. Usually, you have model formats ONNX, or in PyTorch, they have FX Tracer that allows you to trace the FX graph. And then it goes through TVM. We also realized that, well, yes, it needs to be more customizable, so it will be able to perform some of the compilation optimizations like fusion operator together, doing smart memory planning, and more importantly, generate low-level code. So that works for NVIDIA and also is portable to other GPU backends, even non-GPU backends [00:13:36]Swyx: out there. [00:13:37]Tianqi: So that's a project that actually has been my primary focus over the past few years. And it's great to see how it started from where I think we are the very early initiator of machine learning compilation. I remember there was a visit one day, one of the students asked me, are you still working on deep learning frameworks? I tell them that I'm working on ML compilation. And they said, okay, compilation, that sounds very ancient. It sounds like a very old field. And why are you working on this? And now it's starting to get more traction, like if you say Torch Compile and other things. I'm really glad to see this field starting to pick up. And also we have to continue innovating here. [00:14:17]Alessio: I think the other thing that I noticed is, it's kind of like a big jump in terms of area of focus to go from XGBoost to TVM, it's kind of like a different part of the stack. Why did you decide to do that? And I think the other thing about compiling to different GPUs and eventually CPUs too, did you already see some of the strain that models could have just being focused on one runtime, only being on CUDA and that, and how much of that went into it? [00:14:50]Tianqi: I think it's less about trying to get impact, more about wanting to have fun. I like to hack code, I had great fun hacking CUDA code. Of course, being able to generate CUDA code is cool, right? But now, after being able to generate CUDA code, okay, by the way, you can do it on other platforms, isn't that amazing? So it's more of that attitude to get me started on this. And also, I think when we look at different researchers, myself is more like a problem solver type. So I like to look at a problem and say, okay, what kind of tools we need to solve that problem? So regardless, it could be building better models. For example, while we build extra boots, we build certain regularizations into it so that it's more robust. It also means building system optimizations, writing low-level code, maybe trying to write assembly and build compilers and so on. So as long as they solve the problem, definitely go and try to do them together. And I also see it's a common trend right now. Like if you want to be able to solve machine learning problems, it's no longer at Aggressor layer, right? You kind of need to solve it from both Aggressor data and systems angle. And this entire field of machine learning system, I think it's kind of emerging. And there's now a conference around it. And it's really good to see a lot more people are starting to look into this. [00:16:10]Swyx: Yeah. Are you talking about ICML or something else? [00:16:13]Tianqi: So machine learning and systems, right? So not only machine learning, but machine learning and system. So there's a conference called MLsys. It's definitely a smaller community than ICML, but I think it's also an emerging and growing community where people are talking about what are the implications of building systems for machine learning, right? And how do you go and optimize things around that and co-design models and systems together? [00:16:37]Swyx: Yeah. And you were area chair for ICML and NeurIPS as well. So you've just had a lot of conference and community organization experience. Is that also an important part of your work? Well, it's kind of expected for academic. [00:16:48]Tianqi: If I hold an academic job, I need to do services for the community. Okay, great. [00:16:53]Swyx: Your most recent venture in MLsys is going to the phone with MLCLLM. You announced this in April. I have it on my phone. It's great. I'm running Lama 2, Vicuña. I don't know what other models that you offer. But maybe just kind of describe your journey into MLC. And I don't know how this coincides with your work at CMU. Is that some kind of outgrowth? [00:17:18]Tianqi: I think it's more like a focused effort that we want in the area of machine learning compilation. So it's kind of related to what we built in TVM. So when we built TVM was five years ago, right? And a lot of things happened. We built the end-to-end machine learning compiler that works, the first one that works. But then we captured a lot of lessons there. So then we are building a second iteration called TVM Unity. That allows us to be able to allow ML engineers to be able to quickly capture the new model and how we demand building optimizations for them. And MLCLLM is kind of like an MLC. It's more like a vertical driven organization that we go and build tutorials and go and build projects like LLM to solutions. So that to really show like, okay, you can take machine learning compilation technology and apply it and bring something fun forward. Yeah. So yes, it runs on phones, which is really cool. But the goal here is not only making it run on phones, right? The goal is making it deploy universally. So we do run on Apple M2 Macs, the 17 billion models. Actually, on a single batch inference, more recently on CUDA, we get, I think, the most best performance you can get out there already on the 4-bit inference. Actually, as I alluded earlier before the podcast, we just had a result on AMD. And on a single batch, actually, we can get the latest AMD GPU. This is a consumer card. It can get to about 80% of the 4019, so NVIDIA's best consumer card out there. So it's not yet on par, but thinking about how diversity and what you can enable and the previous things you can get on that card, it's really amazing that what you can do with this kind of technology. [00:19:10]Swyx: So one thing I'm a little bit confused by is that most of these models are in PyTorch, but you're running this inside a TVM. I don't know. Was there any fundamental change that you needed to do, or was this basically the fundamental design of TVM? [00:19:25]Tianqi: So the idea is that, of course, it comes back to program representation, right? So effectively, TVM has this program representation called TVM script that contains more like computational graph and operational representation. So yes, initially, we do need to take a bit of effort of bringing those models onto the program representation that TVM supports. Usually, there are a mix of ways, depending on the kind of model you're looking at. For example, for vision models and stable diffusion models, usually we can just do tracing that takes PyTorch model onto TVM. That part is still being robustified so that we can bring more models in. On language model tasks, actually what we do is we directly build some of the model constructors and try to directly map from Hugging Face models. The goal is if you have a Hugging Face configuration, we will be able to bring that in and apply optimization on them. So one fun thing about model compilation is that your optimization doesn't happen only as a soft language, right? For example, if you're writing PyTorch code, you just go and try to use a better fused operator at a source code level. Torch compile might help you do a bit of things in there. In most of the model compilations, it not only happens at the beginning stage, but we also apply generic transformations in between, also through a Python API. So you can tweak some of that. So that part of optimization helps a lot of uplifting in getting both performance and also portability on the environment. And another thing that we do have is what we call universal deployment. So if you get the ML program into this TVM script format, where there are functions that takes in tensor and output tensor, we will be able to have a way to compile it. So they will be able to load the function in any of the language runtime that TVM supports. So if you could load it in JavaScript, and that's a JavaScript function that you can take in tensors and output tensors. If you're loading Python, of course, and C++ and Java. So the goal there is really bring the ML model to the language that people care about and be able to run it on a platform they like. [00:21:37]Swyx: It strikes me that I've talked to a lot of compiler people, but you don't have a traditional compiler background. You're inventing your own discipline called machine learning compilation, or MLC. Do you think that this will be a bigger field going forward? [00:21:52]Tianqi: First of all, I do work with people working on compilation as well. So we're also taking inspirations from a lot of early innovations in the field. Like for example, TVM initially, we take a lot of inspirations from Halide, which is just an image processing compiler. And of course, since then, we have evolved quite a bit to focus on the machine learning related compilations. If you look at some of our conference publications, you'll find that machine learning compilation is already kind of a subfield. So if you look at papers in both machine learning venues, the MLC conferences, of course, and also system venues, every year there will be papers around machine learning compilation. And in the compiler conference called CGO, there's a C4ML workshop that also kind of trying to focus on this area. So definitely it's already starting to gain traction and becoming a field. I wouldn't claim that I invented this field, but definitely I helped to work with a lot of folks there. And I try to bring a perspective, of course, trying to learn a lot from the compiler optimizations as well as trying to bring in knowledges in machine learning and systems together. [00:23:07]Alessio: So we had George Hotz on the podcast a few episodes ago, and he had a lot to say about AMD and their software. So when you think about TVM, are you still restricted in a way by the performance of the underlying kernel, so to speak? So if your target is like a CUDA runtime, you still get better performance, no matter like TVM kind of helps you get there, but then that level you don't take care of, right? [00:23:34]Swyx: There are two parts in here, right? [00:23:35]Tianqi: So first of all, there is the lower level runtime, like CUDA runtime. And then actually for NVIDIA, a lot of the mood came from their libraries, like Cutlass, CUDN, right? Those library optimizations. And also for specialized workloads, actually you can specialize them. Because a lot of cases you'll find that if you go and do benchmarks, it's very interesting. Like two years ago, if you try to benchmark ResNet, for example, usually the NVIDIA library [00:24:04]Swyx: gives you the best performance. [00:24:06]Tianqi: It's really hard to beat them. But as soon as you start to change the model to something, maybe a bit of a variation of ResNet, not for the traditional ImageNet detections, but for latent detection and so on, there will be some room for optimization because people sometimes overfit to benchmarks. These are people who go and optimize things, right? So people overfit the benchmarks. So that's the largest barrier, like being able to get a low level kernel libraries, right? In that sense, the goal of TVM is actually we try to have a generic layer to both, of course, leverage libraries when available, but also be able to automatically generate [00:24:45]Swyx: libraries when possible. [00:24:46]Tianqi: So in that sense, we are not restricted by the libraries that they have to offer. That's why we will be able to run Apple M2 or WebGPU where there's no library available because we are kind of like automatically generating libraries. That makes it easier to support less well-supported hardware, right? For example, WebGPU is one example. From a runtime perspective, AMD, I think before their Vulkan driver was not very well supported. Recently, they are getting good. But even before that, we'll be able to support AMD through this GPU graphics backend called Vulkan, which is not as performant, but it gives you a decent portability across those [00:25:29]Swyx: hardware. [00:25:29]Alessio: And I know we got other MLC stuff to talk about, like WebLLM, but I want to wrap up on the optimization that you're doing. So there's kind of four core things, right? Kernel fusion, which we talked a bit about in the flash attention episode and the tiny grab one memory planning and loop optimization. I think those are like pretty, you know, self-explanatory. I think the one that people have the most questions, can you can you quickly explain [00:25:53]Swyx: those? [00:25:54]Tianqi: So there are kind of a different things, right? Kernel fusion means that, you know, if you have an operator like Convolutions or in the case of a transformer like MOP, you have other operators that follow that, right? You don't want to launch two GPU kernels. You want to be able to put them together in a smart way, right? And as a memory planning, it's more about, you know, hey, if you run like Python code, every time when you generate a new array, you are effectively allocating a new piece of memory, right? Of course, PyTorch and other frameworks try to optimize for you. So there is a smart memory allocator behind the scene. But actually, in a lot of cases, it's much better to statically allocate and plan everything ahead of time. And that's where like a compiler can come in. We need to, first of all, actually for language model, it's much harder because dynamic shape. So you need to be able to what we call symbolic shape tracing. So we have like a symbolic variable that tells you like the shape of the first tensor is n by 12. And the shape of the third tensor is also n by 12. Or maybe it's n times 2 by 12. Although you don't know what n is, right? But you will be able to know that relation and be able to use that to reason about like fusion and other decisions. So besides this, I think loop transformation is quite important. And it's actually non-traditional. Originally, if you simply write a code and you want to get a performance, it's very hard. For example, you know, if you write a matrix multiplier, the simplest thing you can do is you do for i, j, k, c, i, j, plus, equal, you know, a, i, k, times b, i, k. But that code is 100 times slower than the best available code that you can get. So we do a lot of transformation, like being able to take the original code, trying to put things into shared memory, and making use of tensor calls, making use of memory copies, and all this. Actually, all these things, we also realize that, you know, we cannot do all of them. So we also make the ML compilation framework as a Python package, so that people will be able to continuously improve that part of engineering in a more transparent way. So we find that's very useful, actually, for us to be able to get good performance very quickly on some of the new models. Like when Lamato came out, we'll be able to go and look at the whole, here's the bottleneck, and we can go and optimize those. [00:28:10]Alessio: And then the fourth one being weight quantization. So everybody wants to know about that. And just to give people an idea of the memory saving, if you're doing FB32, it's like four bytes per parameter. Int8 is like one byte per parameter. So you can really shrink down the memory footprint. What are some of the trade-offs there? How do you figure out what the right target is? And what are the precision trade-offs, too? [00:28:37]Tianqi: Right now, a lot of people also mostly use int4 now for language models. So that really shrinks things down a lot. And more recently, actually, we started to think that, at least in MOC, we don't want to have a strong opinion on what kind of quantization we want to bring, because there are so many researchers in the field. So what we can do is we can allow developers to customize the quantization they want, but we still bring the optimum code for them. So we are working on this item called bring your own quantization. In fact, hopefully MOC will be able to support more quantization formats. And definitely, I think there's an open field that's being explored. Can you bring more sparsities? Can you quantize activations as much as possible, and so on? And it's going to be something that's going to be relevant for quite a while. [00:29:27]Swyx: You mentioned something I wanted to double back on, which is most people use int4 for language models. This is actually not obvious to me. Are you talking about the GGML type people, or even the researchers who are training the models also using int4? [00:29:40]Tianqi: Sorry, so I'm mainly talking about inference, not training, right? So when you're doing training, of course, int4 is harder, right? Maybe you could do some form of mixed type precision for inference. I think int4 is kind of like, in a lot of cases, you will be able to get away with int4. And actually, that does bring a lot of savings in terms of the memory overhead, and so on. [00:30:09]Alessio: Yeah, that's great. Let's talk a bit about maybe the GGML, then there's Mojo. How should people think about MLC? How do all these things play together? I think GGML is focused on model level re-implementation and improvements. Mojo is a language, super sad. You're more at the compiler level. Do you all work together? Do people choose between them? [00:30:32]Tianqi: So I think in this case, I think it's great to say the ecosystem becomes so rich with so many different ways. So in our case, GGML is more like you're implementing something from scratch in C, right? So that gives you the ability to go and customize each of a particular hardware backend. But then you will need to write from CUDA kernels, and you write optimally from AMD, and so on. So the kind of engineering effort is a bit more broadened in that sense. Mojo, I have not looked at specific details yet. I think it's good to start to say, it's a language, right? I believe there will also be machine learning compilation technologies behind it. So it's good to say, interesting place in there. In the case of MLC, our case is that we do not want to have an opinion on how, where, which language people want to develop, deploy, and so on. And we also realize that actually there are two phases. We want to be able to develop and optimize your model. By optimization, I mean, really bring in the best CUDA kernels and do some of the machine learning engineering in there. And then there's a phase where you want to deploy it as a part of the app. So if you look at the space, you'll find that GGML is more like, I'm going to develop and optimize in the C language, right? And then most of the low-level languages they have. And Mojo is that you want to develop and optimize in Mojo, right? And you deploy in Mojo. In fact, that's the philosophy they want to push for. In the ML case, we find that actually if you want to develop models, the machine learning community likes Python. Python is a language that you should focus on. So in the case of MLC, we really want to be able to enable, not only be able to just define your model in Python, that's very common, right? But also do ML optimization, like engineering optimization, CUDA kernel optimization, memory planning, all those things in Python that makes you customizable and so on. But when you do deployment, we realize that people want a bit of a universal flavor. If you are a web developer, you want JavaScript, right? If you're maybe an embedded system person, maybe you would prefer C++ or C or Rust. And people sometimes do like Python in a lot of cases. So in the case of MLC, we really want to have this vision of, you optimize, build a generic optimization in Python, then you deploy that universally onto the environments that people like. [00:32:54]Swyx: That's a great perspective and comparison, I guess. One thing I wanted to make sure that we cover is that I think you are one of these emerging set of academics that also very much focus on your artifacts of delivery. Of course. Something we talked about for three years, that he was very focused on his GitHub. And obviously you treated XGBoost like a product, you know? And then now you're publishing an iPhone app. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What is his thinking about academics getting involved in shipping products? [00:33:24]Tianqi: I think there are different ways of making impact, right? Definitely, you know, there are academics that are writing papers and building insights for people so that people can build product on top of them. In my case, I think the particular field I'm working on, machine learning systems, I feel like really we need to be able to get it to the hand of people so that really we see the problem, right? And we show that we can solve a problem. And it's a different way of making impact. And there are academics that are doing similar things. Like, you know, if you look at some of the people from Berkeley, right? A few years, they will come up with big open source projects. Certainly, I think it's just a healthy ecosystem to have different ways of making impacts. And I feel like really be able to do open source and work with open source community is really rewarding because we have a real problem to work on when we build our research. Actually, those research bring together and people will be able to make use of them. And we also start to see interesting research challenges that we wouldn't otherwise say, right, if you're just trying to do a prototype and so on. So I feel like it's something that is one interesting way of making impact, making contributions. [00:34:40]Swyx: Yeah, you definitely have a lot of impact there. And having experience publishing Mac stuff before, the Apple App Store is no joke. It is the hardest compilation, human compilation effort. So one thing that we definitely wanted to cover is running in the browser. You have a 70 billion parameter model running in the browser. That's right. Can you just talk about how? Yeah, of course. [00:35:02]Tianqi: So I think that there are a few elements that need to come in, right? First of all, you know, we do need a MacBook, the latest one, like M2 Max, because you need the memory to be big enough to cover that. So for a 70 million model, it takes you about, I think, 50 gigahertz of RAM. So the M2 Max, the upper version, will be able to run it, right? And it also leverages machine learning compilation. Again, what we are doing is the same, whether it's running on iPhone, on server cloud GPUs, on AMDs, or on MacBook, we all go through that same MOC pipeline. Of course, in certain cases, maybe we'll do a bit of customization iteration for either ones. And then it runs on the browser runtime, this package of WebLM. So that will effectively... So what we do is we will take that original model and compile to what we call WebGPU. And then the WebLM will be to pick it up. And the WebGPU is this latest GPU technology that major browsers are shipping right now. So you can get it in Chrome for them already. It allows you to be able to access your native GPUs from a browser. And then effectively, that language model is just invoking the WebGPU kernels through there. So actually, when the LATMAR2 came out, initially, we asked the question about, can you run 17 billion on a MacBook? That was the question we're asking. So first, we actually... Jin Lu, who is the engineer pushing this, he got 17 billion on a MacBook. We had a CLI version. So in MLC, you will be able to... That runs through a metal accelerator. So effectively, you use the metal programming language to get the GPU acceleration. So we find, okay, it works for the MacBook. Then we asked, we had a WebGPU backend. Why not try it there? So we just tried it out. And it's really amazing to see everything up and running. And actually, it runs smoothly in that case. So I do think there are some kind of interesting use cases already in this, because everybody has a browser. You don't need to install anything. I think it doesn't make sense yet to really run a 17 billion model on a browser, because you kind of need to be able to download the weight and so on. But I think we're getting there. Effectively, the most powerful models you will be able to run on a consumer device. It's kind of really amazing. And also, in a lot of cases, there might be use cases. For example, if I'm going to build a chatbot that I talk to it and answer questions, maybe some of the components, like the voice to text, could run on the client side. And so there are a lot of possibilities of being able to have something hybrid that contains the edge component or something that runs on a server. [00:37:47]Alessio: Do these browser models have a way for applications to hook into them? So if I'm using, say, you can use OpenAI or you can use the local model. Of course. [00:37:56]Tianqi: Right now, actually, we are building... So there's an NPM package called WebILM, right? So that you will be able to, if you want to embed it onto your web app, you will be able to directly depend on WebILM and you will be able to use it. We are also having a REST API that's OpenAI compatible. So that REST API, I think, right now, it's actually running on native backend. So that if a CUDA server is faster to run on native backend. But also we have a WebGPU version of it that you can go and run. So yeah, we do want to be able to have easier integrations with existing applications. And OpenAI API is certainly one way to do that. Yeah, this is great. [00:38:37]Swyx: I actually did not know there's an NPM package that makes it very, very easy to try out and use. I want to actually... One thing I'm unclear about is the chronology. Because as far as I know, Chrome shipped WebGPU the same time that you shipped WebILM. Okay, yeah. So did you have some kind of secret chat with Chrome? [00:38:57]Tianqi: The good news is that Chrome is doing a very good job of trying to have early release. So although the official shipment of the Chrome WebGPU is the same time as WebILM, actually, you will be able to try out WebGPU technology in Chrome. There is an unstable version called Canary. I think as early as two years ago, there was a WebGPU version. Of course, it's getting better. So we had a TVM-based WebGPU backhand two years ago. Of course, at that time, there were no language models. It was running on less interesting, well, still quite interesting models. And then this year, we really started to see it getting matured and performance keeping up. So we have a more serious push of bringing the language model compatible runtime onto the WebGPU. [00:39:45]Swyx: I think you agree that the hardest part is the model download. Has there been conversations about a one-time model download and sharing between all the apps that might use this API? That is a great point. [00:39:58]Tianqi: I think it's already supported in some sense. When we download the model, WebILM will cache it onto a special Chrome cache. So if a different web app uses the same WebILM JavaScript package, you don't need to redownload the model again. So there is already something there. But of course, you have to download the model once at least to be able to use it. [00:40:19]Swyx: Okay. One more thing just in general before we're about to zoom out to OctoAI. Just the last question is, you're not the only project working on, I guess, local models. That's right. Alternative models. There's gpt4all, there's olama that just recently came out, and there's a bunch of these. What would be your advice to them on what's a valuable problem to work on? And what is just thin wrappers around ggml? Like, what are the interesting problems in this space, basically? [00:40:45]Tianqi: I think making API better is certainly something useful, right? In general, one thing that we do try to push very hard on is this idea of easier universal deployment. So we are also looking forward to actually have more integration with MOC. That's why we're trying to build API like WebILM and other things. So we're also looking forward to collaborate with all those ecosystems and working support to bring in models more universally and be able to also keep up the best performance when possible in a more push-button way. [00:41:15]Alessio: So as we mentioned in the beginning, you're also the co-founder of Octomel. Recently, Octomel released OctoAI, which is a compute service, basically focuses on optimizing model runtimes and acceleration and compilation. What has been the evolution there? So Octo started as kind of like a traditional MLOps tool, where people were building their own models and you help them on that side. And then it seems like now most of the market is shifting to starting from pre-trained generative models. Yeah, what has been that experience for you and what you've seen the market evolve? And how did you decide to release OctoAI? [00:41:52]Tianqi: One thing that we found out is that on one hand, it's really easy to go and get something up and running, right? So if you start to consider there's so many possible availabilities and scalability issues and even integration issues since becoming kind of interesting and complicated. So we really want to make sure to help people to get that part easy, right? And now a lot of things, if we look at the customers we talk to and the market, certainly generative AI is something that is very interesting. So that is something that we really hope to help elevate. And also building on top of technology we build to enable things like portability across hardwares. And you will be able to not worry about the specific details, right? Just focus on getting the model out. We'll try to work on infrastructure and other things that helps on the other end. [00:42:45]Alessio: And when it comes to getting optimization on the runtime, I see when we run an early adopters community and most enterprises issue is how to actually run these models. Do you see that as one of the big bottlenecks now? I think a few years ago it was like, well, we don't have a lot of machine learning talent. We cannot develop our own models. Versus now it's like, there's these great models you can use, but I don't know how to run them efficiently. [00:43:12]Tianqi: That depends on how you define by running, right? On one hand, it's easy to download your MLC, like you download it, you run on a laptop, but then there's also different decisions, right? What if you are trying to serve a larger user request? What if that request changes? What if the availability of hardware changes? Right now it's really hard to get the latest hardware on media, unfortunately, because everybody's trying to work on the things using the hardware that's out there. So I think when the definition of run changes, there are a lot more questions around things. And also in a lot of cases, it's not only about running models, it's also about being able to solve problems around them. How do you manage your model locations and how do you make sure that you get your model close to your execution environment more efficiently? So definitely a lot of engineering challenges out there. That we hope to elevate, yeah. And also, if you think about our future, definitely I feel like right now the technology, given the technology and the kind of hardware availability we have today, we will need to make use of all the possible hardware available out there. That will include a mechanism for cutting down costs, bringing something to the edge and cloud in a more natural way. So I feel like still this is a very early stage of where we are, but it's already good to see a lot of interesting progress. [00:44:35]Alessio: Yeah, that's awesome. I would love, I don't know how much we're going to go in depth into it, but what does it take to actually abstract all of this from the end user? You know, like they don't need to know what GPUs you run, what cloud you're running them on. You take all of that away. What was that like as an engineering challenge? [00:44:51]Tianqi: So I think that there are engineering challenges on. In fact, first of all, you will need to be able to support all the kind of hardware backhand you have, right? On one hand, if you look at the media library, you'll find very surprisingly, not too surprisingly, most of the latest libraries works well on the latest GPU. But there are other GPUs out there in the cloud as well. So certainly being able to have know-hows and being able to do model optimization is one thing, right? Also infrastructures on being able to scale things up, locate models. And in a lot of cases, we do find that on typical models, it also requires kind of vertical iterations. So it's not about, you know, build a silver bullet and that silver bullet is going to solve all the problems. It's more about, you know, we're building a product, we'll work with the users and we find out there are interesting opportunities in a certain point. And when our engineer will go and solve that, and it will automatically reflect it in a service. [00:45:45]Swyx: Awesome. [00:45:46]Alessio: We can jump into the lightning round until, I don't know, Sean, if you have more questions or TQ, if you have more stuff you wanted to talk about that we didn't get a chance to [00:45:54]Swyx: touch on. [00:45:54]Alessio: Yeah, we have talked a lot. [00:45:55]Swyx: So, yeah. We always would like to ask, you know, do you have a commentary on other parts of AI and ML that is interesting to you? [00:46:03]Tianqi: So right now, I think one thing that we are really pushing hard for is this question about how far can we bring open source, right? I'm kind of like a hacker and I really like to put things together. So I think it's unclear in the future of what the future of AI looks like. On one hand, it could be possible that, you know, you just have a few big players, you just try to talk to those bigger language models and that can do everything, right? On the other hand, one of the things that Wailing Academic is really excited and pushing for, that's one reason why I'm pushing for MLC, is that can we build something where you have different models? You have personal models that know the best movie you like, but you also have bigger models that maybe know more, and you get those models to interact with each other, right? And be able to have a wide ecosystem of AI agents that helps each person while still being able to do things like personalization. Some of them can run locally, some of them, of course, running on a cloud, and how do they interact with each other? So I think that is a very exciting time where the future is yet undecided, but I feel like there is something we can do to shape that future as well. [00:47:18]Swyx: One more thing, which is something I'm also pursuing, which is, and this kind of goes back into predictions, but also back in your history, do you have any idea, or are you looking out for anything post-transformers as far as architecture is concerned? [00:47:32]Tianqi: I think, you know, in a lot of these cases, you can find there are already promising models for long contexts, right? There are space-based models, where like, you know, a lot of some of our colleagues from Albert, who he worked on this HIPPO models, right? And then there is an open source version called RWKV. It's like a recurrent models that allows you to summarize things. Actually, we are bringing RWKV to MOC as well, so maybe you will be able to see one of the models. [00:48:00]Swyx: We actually recorded an episode with one of the RWKV core members. It's unclear because there's no academic backing. It's just open source people. Oh, I see. So you like the merging of recurrent networks and transformers? [00:48:13]Tianqi: I do love to see this model space continue growing, right? And I feel like in a lot of cases, it's just that attention mechanism is getting changed in some sense. So I feel like definitely there are still a lot of things to be explored here. And that is also one reason why we want to keep pushing machine learning compilation, because one of the things we are trying to push in was productivity. So that for machine learning engineering, so that as soon as some of the models came out, we will be able to, you know, empower them onto those environments that's out there. [00:48:43]Swyx: Yeah, it's a really good mission. Okay. Very excited to see that RWKV and state space model stuff. I'm hearing increasing chatter about that stuff. Okay. Lightning round, as always fun. I'll take the first one. Acceleration. What has already happened in AI that you thought would take much longer? [00:48:59]Tianqi: Emergence of more like a conversation chatbot ability is something that kind of surprised me before it came out. This is like one piece that I feel originally I thought would take much longer, but yeah, [00:49:11]Swyx: it happens. And it's funny because like the original, like Eliza chatbot was something that goes all the way back in time. Right. And then we just suddenly came back again. Yeah. [00:49:21]Tianqi: It's always too interesting to think about, but with a kind of a different technology [00:49:25]Swyx: in some sense. [00:49:25]Alessio: What about the most interesting unsolved question in AI? [00:49:31]Swyx: That's a hard one, right? [00:49:32]Tianqi: So I can tell you like what kind of I'm excited about. So, so I think that I have always been excited about this idea of continuous learning and lifelong learning in some sense. So how AI continues to evolve with the knowledges that have been there. It seems that we're getting much closer with all those recent technologies. So being able to develop systems, support, and be able to think about how AI continues to evolve is something that I'm really excited about. [00:50:01]Swyx: So specifically, just to double click on this, are you talking about continuous training? That's like a training. [00:50:06]Tianqi: I feel like, you know, training adaptation and it's all similar things, right? You want to think about entire life cycle, right? The life cycle of collecting data, training, fine tuning, and maybe have your local context that getting continuously curated and feed onto models. So I think all these things are interesting and relevant in here. [00:50:29]Swyx: Yeah. I think this is something that people are really asking, you know, right now we have moved a lot into the sort of pre-training phase and off the shelf, you know, the model downloads and stuff like that, which seems very counterintuitive compared to the continuous training paradigm that people want. So I guess the last question would be for takeaways. What's basically one message that you want every listener, every person to remember today? [00:50:54]Tianqi: I think it's getting more obvious now, but I think one of the things that I always want to mention in my talks is that, you know, when you're thinking about AI applications, originally people think about algorithms a lot more, right? Our algorithm models, they are still very important. But usually when you build AI applications, it takes, you know, both algorithm side, the system optimizations, and the data curations, right? So it takes a connection of so many facades to be able to bring together an AI system and be able to look at it from that holistic perspective is really useful when we start to build modern applications. I think it's going to continue going to be more important in the future. [00:51:35]Swyx: Yeah. Thank you for showing the way on this. And honestly, just making things possible that I thought would take a lot longer. So thanks for everything you've done. [00:51:46]Tianqi: Thank you for having me. [00:51:47]Swyx: Yeah. [00:51:47]Alessio: Thanks for coming on TQ. [00:51:49]Swyx: Have a good one. [00:51:49] Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Our 3rd podcast feed swap with other AI pod friends! Check out Cognitive Revolution and Practical AI as well.NLW is the best daily AI YouTube/podcaster with the AI Breakdown. His summaries and content curation are spot on and always finds the interesting angle that will keep you thinking. Subscribe to the AI Breakdown wherever fine podcasts are sold! https://pod.link/1680633614You can also watch on YouTube:Timestampscourtesy of summarize.techThe hosts discuss the launch of Code Interpreter as a separate model from OpenAI and speculate that it represents the release of GPT 4.5. People have found Code Interpreter to be better than expected, even for tasks unrelated to coding. They discuss the significance of this release, as well as the challenges of evaluating AI models, the cultural mismatch between researchers and users, and the increasing value of data in the AI industry. They also touch on the impact of open-source tools, the potential of AI companions, the advantages of Anthropics compared to other platforms, advancements in image recognition and multimodality, and predictions for the future of AI.* 00:00:00 In this section, the hosts discuss the launch of Code Interpreter from OpenAI and its significance in the development of the AI field. They explain that Code Interpreter, initially introduced as a plugin, is now considered a separate model with its own dropdown menu. They note that people have found Code Interpreter to be better than expected, even for tasks that are not related to coding. This leads them to speculate that Code Interpreter actually represents the release of GPT 4.5, as there has been no official announcement or blog post about it. They also mention that the AI safety concerns and regulatory environment may be impacting how OpenAI names and labels their models. Overall, they believe that Code Interpreter's release signifies a significant shift in the AI field and hints at the possibility of future advanced models like GPT 5.* 00:05:00 In this section, the speaker discusses the improvements in GPT 4.5 and how it enhances the experience for non-coding queries and inputs. They explain that the code interpreter feature allows for a wider range of use cases that were not possible with previous models like GPT 3.5. Additionally, they highlight the value of the code interpreter in assisting individuals with no coding experience to solve basic coding problems. This feature is likened to having a junior developer or intern analyst that aids in conducting tests and simplifies coding tasks. The speaker emphasizes that GPT 4.5 enables users to be more productive and efficient, especially when dealing with code-related challenges. They also discuss the future direction of AGI, where more time will be dedicated to inference rather than training, as this approach has shown significant improvements in terms of problem-solving.* 00:10:00 In this section, the speaker discusses how advanced AI models like GPT-4.5 are not just larger versions of previous models but rather employ fundamentally different techniques. They compare the evolution of AI models to the evolutionary timeline of humans, where the invention of tools opened up a whole new set of possibilities. They touch on the difficulty of evaluating AI models, particularly in more subjective tasks, and highlight how perceptions of model performance can be influenced by factors like formatting preferences. Additionally, the speaker mentions the challenges of reinforcement learning and the uncertainty around what the model is prioritizing in its suggestions. They conclude that OpenAI, as a research lab, is grappling with the complexities of updating models and ensuring reliability for users.* 00:15:00 In this section, the speaker discusses the cultural mismatch between OpenAI researchers and users of OpenAI's products, highlighting the conflicting statements made about model updates. They suggest that OpenAI needs to establish a policy that everyone can accept. The speaker also emphasizes the challenges of communication and the difficulty of serving different stakeholders. They mention the impact of small disruptions on workflows and the lack of immediate feedback within OpenAI's system. Additionally, the speaker briefly discusses the significance of OpenAI's custom instructions feature, stating that it allows for more personalization but is not fundamentally different from what other chat companies already offer. The discussion then transitions to Facebook's release of LAMA2, which holds significance both technically and for users, although further details on its significance are not provided in this excerpt.* 00:20:00 In this section, the introduction of GPT-4.5, also known as LAVA 2, is discussed. LAVA 2 is the first fully commercially usable GPT 3.5 equivalent model, which is a significant development because it allows users to run it on their own infrastructure and fine-tune it according to their needs. Although it is not fully open source, it presents new opportunities for various industries such as government, healthcare, and finance. The discussion also touches upon the open source aspect of LAVA 2, with the recognition that it has still contributed significantly to the community, as evidenced by the three million dollars' worth of compute and the estimated 15 to 20 million dollars' worth of additional fine-tuning capabilities it brings. The conversation acknowledges the value of open source models and data, while also recognizing the challenges and complexities in striking a balance between openness and restrictions.-* 00:25:00 In this section, the discussion centers around the commoditization of compute and the increasing value of data in the AI industry. While GPU compute is currently in high demand, it is observed that data is what holds the real value in AI. The conversation touches on the history of Open Source models and how the release of data for models like GPT J and GPT Neo signal a shift towards prioritizing data over model weights. The transcript also mentions the caution around data usage, citing examples of copyright concerns with datasets like Bookcorpus. The debate arises on whether ML engineers should proactively use open data or wait for permission, with some arguing for proactive usage to avoid holding back progress. The conversation also discusses the importance of terminology and protecting the definition of open source, while recognizing that the functional implications of open data are what matter most.* 00:30:00 In this section, the conversation revolves around the impact of open-source tools on companies and how it has influenced their approach to AI development. It is noted that companies can no longer just offer a nice user interface (UI) wrapper around an open AI model, as customers are demanding more. The competition has shifted towards other aspects of productionizing AI applications, which is seen as a positive development. The speaker predicts that OpenAI's competitive pressure will lead to opening up their source code and expects interesting advancements to emerge, such as running models locally for unlimited use. Additionally, the conversation touches on the potential of commercially available models, the application of new techniques, and the creativity unlocked by open source. The speaker also mentions the AI girlfriend economy, an area that is often overlooked but has millions of users and significant financial success.* 00:35:00 In this section, the speaker discusses their prediction about the long-term impact of AI on interpersonal relationships, suggesting that AI companions, such as AI girlfriends or boyfriends, could help address the loneliness crisis and reduce incidents of violence. They also mention the idea of using AI models to improve social interactions and communication skills. However, they highlight that this idea of AI companions may face resistance from older generations who may struggle to accept their legitimacy. The speaker also mentions an example of using AI models to create a mental wellness product in the form of a private journal. Overall, the speaker believes that while AI companions may have potential, they may not completely replace human relationships and interactions.* 00:40:00 In this section, the speaker discusses their views on Anthropics and the advantages it offers compared to other platforms. They mention that while Anthropics used to position themselves as the safer alternative to OpenAI, it was not appealing to many engineers. However, with the introduction of the 100K contest window and the ability to upload multiple files, Anthropics has become state-of-the-art in certain dimensions, such as latency and reliability in code synthesis. The speaker also notes that some businesses are choosing to build with the Anthropics API over OpenAI due to these advantages. They believe that Anthropics is finally finding its foothold after being overshadowed by OpenAI for a long time. Additionally, the speaker discusses their experience at the Anthropics hackathon, where they saw developer excitement for the platform. They believe that Anthropics is on its way up and that it paves the way for a multi-model future. However, they also acknowledge that the odds are stacked against Anthropics and that it needs more marketing support and community buy-in. Lastly, the speaker mentions the importance of running chats side by side against different models like Tracicia and GPT-4.5, and highlights that in their experience, Anthropics wins about 30% of the time, making it a valuable addition to one's toolkit.* 00:45:00 In this section, the discussion revolves around the advancements in image recognition and multimodality in language models like GPT-4.5. While there was some excitement about these developments, it was noted that relying on model updates alone may not be sufficient, and there is a need to focus on product-level improvements, such as integrating language models into services like Google Maps. However, concerns were raised about the reliability of updates, as evidenced by a regression in Bard's code interpreter functionality. Additionally, other trends in the developer community, like the emergence of auto GPT projects and the ongoing quest for building useful agents, were highlighted. Finally, there was mention of the growing interest in evaluation-focused companies like LangChain and LaunchLang, which aim to monitor the success of prompts and agents.* 00:50:00 In this section, the speaker discusses the focus on model evaluation and observability, as well as the importance of combining deep industry expertise with AI technology to make improvements. They also touch on the need for creating an information hierarchy between documents and scoring them in specific verticals like Finance. The speaker mentions advancements in text-to-image capabilities and expresses interest in character AI and AI-native social media. They mention the possibility of AI personas from Meta and the development of agent clouds optimized for EI agents. They acknowledge that these advancements may raise concerns among AI safety proponents. Overall, there seems to be excitement and exploration around these emerging technologies.* 00:55:00 In this section, the speakers discuss their predictions and what they are closely watching in the coming months. Alice believes that there will be more public talk about open source models being used in production, as currently, many perceive them as just toys. She expects companies to start deploying these models and showcasing their usage. Sean predicts the rise of AI engineers as a profession, with people transitioning from informal groups to certified professionals working in AI teams within companies. He mentions that the first AI engineer within Meta has already been announced. Overall, they anticipate a relatively quiet August followed by a resurgence of activity in September, with events like Facebook Connect and continued hackathons driving innovation.Transcriptall right what is going on how's it going boys great to have you here hey good how are y'all good I I think I'm excited for this yeah no I'm super excited I think uh you know we were just talking a little bit before this that the AI audience right now is really interesting it's sort of on the one hand you have of course the folks who are actually in it who are building in it who are you know or or dabbling because they're in some other field but they're fascinated by it and you know are spending their nights in weekends building and then on the other hand you have the folks who are you know what we used to call non-technical perhaps but who are actively paying attention in a way that I think is very different to the technical evolutions of this field because they have a sense or an understanding that it's so fast moving that the place that they have to be paying attention to is you know what's changing from the standpoint of of developers and Builders so I what we want to do today is kind of reflect on the month of July which had a couple of I think really Keystone events in the context of what it means for the technical development of the AI field and and what you know where it leads how people's Frameworks are changing how people sort of sense that things have changed over the last month and I think that the place to start although we could choose a lot of different examples is with an idea that you guys have spent a lot of time sharing on Twitter and in other places that the launch of code interpreter from openai which is nominally a chat GPT plugin actually represents functionally something closer to the release of GPT 4.5 so maybe we can start by just having you guys sort of explain that idea uh and then we can kind of take it from there yeah I'll maybe start with this one um yeah so quote interpreter was first announced as a plug-in at least in the plugins announcement from March but from the start it was already presented as a separate model because at least when you look in the UI you know you don't go into the charity plugin see why and pick it from a menu plugins it is actually a separate model in in the drop down menu and it is so today and I think um yes it adds on an additional sandbox for running and testing code and iterating on that um and actually you can upload files to it and do operations and files and people are having a lot of fun uploading different batteries and hacking uh to see what the container is and try to break out into the Container um but what really convinced me that it might be a separate model was when people tried it on tasks that were not code and found it better so code interpreter is poorly named not just because you know it just sounds like a like a weird developer Tool uh but they basically it's kind of maybe hiding some progress that openai has made that it's completely not been public about there's no blog post about it what interpreter itself is launched in a support Forum post uh you know low-key it wouldn't even announced by any of the major uh public channels that opening has um and so the leading theory is that you know I've dubbed a gpp 4.5 I think like if they were ever to release an API for that they might retroactively rename it for coin firings in the same way that 3.5 was actually renamed when retracted between three rooms um and I think and since I published that post or tweeted that stuff uh the the leading release now for why they did not do it is because they would piss off all the AI safety people yeah no I mean it would it was sort of correspondent obviously like a thing that's happened less just this month but more over the last three months is a total Overton window shift in that AI safety conversation starting from I think about in April or May when um Jeffrey Hinton left Google there has been a big shift in that conversation obviously Regulators are way more active now than they were even a couple months ago and so I do think that there are probably constraints in how you know open AI at any other company in the space feel like they can label or name things and even just as we're recording this today we just saw a trademark for gpt5 which is sort of most likely I think just um you know dotting the eyes and crossing the t's as a company because they're eventually going to have a gpt5 um I I would be very shocked if it I would be very shocked at this point if there are any models that are clearly ahead of gpt4 that don't that that come out before there is some pretty clear guidance from the US government around what it looks like to release more advanced models than gpt4 so it's an interesting interesting moment I guess let's talk about what functionally it means for it to be you know that much better better enough that we would call it GPT 4.5 and maybe what might be useful is breaking that apart into how it is improving the experience for non-coding queries or you know or or or or or inputs and then separately you know how it is made uh to chat gbt as a as a as a coding support tool different as well I think there's a lot of things to think about so one models are usually benchmarked against certain tasks and you know that works for development but then there's the reality of the model that you know if you ask for example mathematical question the like gpd3 3.5 you don't really get good responses because of how um digits are tokenized in the model so it's hard for the models to actually reason about numbers but now that you put a code interpreter in it all of a sudden it's not a map in the tokenizer in the latent space question it's like can you write code that answers the math question so that kind of enables a lot more use cases that are just not possible with the Transformer architecture of the underlying model and then the other thing is that when it first came out people were like oh this is great for developers it's like I know what to do I just ask it but there's this whole other side of the water which is hey I have this like very basic thing you know how I'm a software engineer but background you know how sometimes people that have no coding experience come to you and it's like hey I know this is like really hard but could you help me do this and it's like it's really easy and sometimes it and sometimes they think it's easy and it's hard but uh code interpreter enables that whole um space of problems to be solved independently by people so it's kind of having you know Sean talked about this before about um some of these models being like a junior developer that you have on staff for you to be more productive this is similar for non-business people it's like having Junior you know whatever like a intern analyst that helps you do these tests that are not even like software engineering tasks it's more like code is just a language used to express them it's like a pretty basic stuff sometimes uh but you just cannot cannot do it without so uh for me the gbd4 4.5 thing is less about you know is this a new model that is like built after gbd4 it's more about capability so if you have gbt4 versus 4.5 you're probably gonna get more stuff done with 4.5 just because of like the code interpreter Peace So for me that's enough to use the code name but as you said Sam Allman said they're not training the next model so they said this is 4.5 you would have like it would go back to Washington DC and be in front of Congress and have to talk about it again sorry yeah um well one thing that I always want to impress upon people is we're not just talking about like yes it is writing code for you but actually you know if you step back away from the code and just think about what it's doing is it's having the ability to spend more Insurance time on harder problems and it matches what uh we do when we are faced with difficult problems as well because right now any llm and these before code interpreter any llm if you give it a question like what is one plus two it'll it'll take the same amount of time to respond as uh something like prove the Black Shoals theorem right like uh and that should not be the case actually we should take more time to think when we are considering harder problems um and I think what I think the next Frontier and why I called it 4.5 is not just because it has had extra training it's not just because it has the coding environment and also because there's a general philosophy and move that I see on my open EI um and the people that it hires that so in my blog post I called out gong who like I first slowly met so it's kind of awkward to talk about it like I guess a friend or a friend of a friend um but it's true that I have met multiple people not opening I have specifically been hired to work on more inference time uh optimizations as compared to trading time um and I think that is the future for gpd5s right so the reason you the reason I think about this working client is that this is the direction of AGI that we're going to spend more time on inference um and uh it just makes a whole lot of sense when you look at gnomes background working on the uh the broadest and then Cicero um all of which is just consistently the same result which is every second or millisecond extra spent on inference it's worth like 10 000 of that of of that in training especially when you can vary it based on the problem difficulty um and this is basically uh ties back to the origin of open AI which originally started playing games they used to play DotA they used to play uh you know all sorts of all sorts of games in sort of those reinforcement learning environments and the typical way that your program these AI is doing doing uh doing these games is when they have lots of branches and you take more time to Circle and um and figure out what the optimal strategy is and when there's not that many branches to to go down then you just take the shortcut in uh you have to give to give the right answer but varying the inference time is the integration here one of the things that it it seems and this what you just described I think aligns with this is I think there's a perception that uh more advanced models are just going to be bigger data sets with more of the same type of training versus sort of fundamentally different techniques or different areas of emphasis that go beyond just how big the data set is and so you know one of the things that strikes me listening to or kind of observing how code interpreter works is it almost feels like a break in The evolutionary timeline of gbt because it's like GPT with tools right unless you just kind of described it it's like it doesn't know about math it doesn't have to know about math if it can write code to figure out the math right so what it needs is the tool of being able to write code and that allows it to figure something out and that is akin to you know humans are evolving for Millennia not using tools then all of a sudden someone picks up a rock and this whole entire set of things that we couldn't do before just based on our own evolutionary pathway are now open to us because of the use of the tool I don't think it's a Perfect Analogy but it does feel somewhat closer to that than just again like it's a little bit better than 3.5 so we called it four it's a little bit better than four so we called it 4.5 kind of a mental framework yeah noise I made there I guess sort of the the another big topic that relates to this that was subject of a lot of conversation not just this month that has been for a couple months is this question of whether gpt4 has gotten worse or whether it's been nerfed and there was some research that came out around that with maybe um variable variable uh sort of feelings around it but what did you guys make of that whole conversation I think evals are one of the hardest things in the space so I've had this discussion with Founders before it's really easy we always bring up co-pilot as one example of like Cutting Edge eval where they not not only look at how much um of their suggestions you accept but also how much of the code is still in a minute after three minutes after five minutes after it's really easy to do for code but like for more open and degenerative tasks it's kind of hard to say what's good and what isn't you know like if I'm asking to write the show notes for our podcast which has never been able to do um how do you how do you email that it's really hard so even if you read through through the paper that uh Ling Zhao and mate and James wrote a lot of things are like yeah they're they're worse but like how do you really say that you know like sometimes it's not kind of you know cut and dry like sometimes it's like oh the formatting changed and like I don't like this formatting as much but if the formatting was always the same to begin with would you have ever complained you know there's there's a lot of that um and I think with llama too we've seen that sometimes like rlh traffic can like go wrong in terms of like being too tight you know for example somebody has Lama too is like how do you kill a process in like Linux and Mama 2 was like oh it's wrong to like kill and like I cannot help you like doing that you know um and I think there's been more more chat online about you know sometimes when you do reinforcement learning you don't know what reward and like what what part of like the the suggestion the model is anchoring on you know like sometimes it's like oh this is better sometimes the model might be learning that you like more verbose question answers even though they're they're right the same way so there's a lot of stuff there to figure out but yeah I think some examples in the paper like clearly worse some of them are like not as not as crazy um yeah but I mean it'll be nice under a lot of pressure on the unlike the safety and like all the the instruction side and we cannot like the best thing to do would be hey let's version lock the model and like keep doing emails against each other like doing an email today and an email like that was like a year ago there might be like 20 versions in between that you don't even know how the model has has changed so um yeah evals are are hard it's the tldr I I think I think basically this is what we're seeing is open AI having come to terms with that the origin of itself as a research lab where updating models this is is just a relatively routine operation versus a product or infrastructure company where it has to have some kind of reliability guarantee to its users um and so openai are they internally as researchers are used to one thing and then the people who come and depend on open EI as on as as a product are used to a different thing and I think there's there's a little bit of cultural mismatch here like even within open ai's public statements we have simultaneously Logan from from open AI saying that the models are frozen and then you know his his VPO product saying that we update models all the time that are not frozen so which is like you cannot simultaneously be true um so so I think they're shot yeah I think they're trying to figure it out I think people are rightly afraid uh of them basing themselves on top of a black box uh and that's why maybe you know we'll talk about llama too in a bit uh that's that's why maybe they want to own the Black Box such that uh it doesn't change out from underturn um and I think this is fine this is normal but uh openai it's not that hard for opening night to figure out a policy that is comfortable with that that everybody like accepts um it won't take them too long and this is not a technical challenge it's more of a organizational and business challenge yeah I mean I I think that the communications challenge that you're referencing is also extreme and I think that you're right to identify that they've gone from like quirky little you know lab with these big aspirations to like epicenter of a of a national conversation or a global conversation about existential challenges you know and the way that you talk in those two different circumstances is very different and you're sort of serving a lot of different Masters hopefully always Guided by your own set of priorities and that's going to be you know inherently difficult uh but with so many eyes on it and people who are you know the thing that makes it different is it's not just like Facebook where it's like oh we've got a new feature you know in the early days that made us all annoyed like you know people were so angry when they added the feed uh you know that we all got used to it this is something where people have redesigned workflows around it and so small disruptions that change those workflows can be hugely impactful yeah it's an interesting comparison with the Facebook feed because in the era of AD Tech the feedback was immediate like you changed an algorithm and if the click-through rates are the you know the whatever metric you're you're optimizing for in your social network if they started to start to decline your change will be reverted tomorrow you know uh whereas here it's like we just talked about it's hard to measure and you don't get that much feedback like I you know I I have there's sort of the thumbs up and down uh action that you can take an open AI that I've never shared most people don't don't give feedback at all so like opening a has very little feedback to to go with on like what is actually improving under not improving and I think this is just normal like uh it's it's kind of what we want in a non-adtrack universe right like we've just moved to the subscription economy that everyone is like piety for uh and this is the result that we're trading off uh uh some some amount of product feedback actually it's super interesting so the the one other thing before we leave um uh open AI ecosystem the one other big sort of feature announcement from this month was uh custom instructions how significant do you think that was as an update so minor uh so it is significant in the sense that you get to personalize track TBT much more than uh you previously would have like it actually will remember facts about you it will try to obey system prompts about you you had this in the playground since forever uh because you could enter in the system prompt uh in there and just chat to complete that habit and this is a rare instance of the chat tpd team lagging behind the general capabilities of the open AI platform uh and they just shipped something that could have been there a long time ago it was present in perplexity Ai and if you think about it um basically every other open source chat company or open uh we have a third-party chat company had already had it before tragedy um so what I'm talking about is character AI what I'm talking about is the various uh ai waifu ai girlfriend type companies Each of which have you know characters that you can sort of sub in as custom instructions um so I think chargpt is basically playing catch up here it's good for obviously the largest user base in the world of chat AI but it's not something fundamentally we haven't seen before that actually I think perfectly brings up a segue to the other major obvious thing that happened this month from both a technical perspective but also just I think long term from a user perspective which was Facebook releasing llama 2. so this was something that was uh you know anticipated for a while but I I guess where to even start with the significance of llama 2 I mean how do you sum it up if you're talking to someone who sort of isn't paying attention to the space you know what what does the introduction of of lava 2 mean relative to other things that had been available previous to it um it is the first fully commercially usable not fully open source we'll talk about that first fully commercially usable gbt 3.5 equivalent model and that's a big deal because one you can run it on your own infrastructure you can write it on your own cloud so all the governments and Healthcare and financial use cases are opened up to that and then you can fine tune it because you have full control over all the weights and all the internals as much as you want um so it's a big deal from from that point of view um not as big in terms of the you know pushing you know for the state of the art um but it's still still extremely big deal yep I think the the open source part so I've wrote so the data it came out over this post um about you know why llamasu is not open source and why it doesn't matter and uh I was telling Sean I'm writing this thing and it was like whatever man like this license stuff is like so so tired I was like yeah I'll just post it on on anchor news in the morning and I think it was on the front page for like the whole day they got like 228 comments and I was regarding the flash attention podcast episode in the morning so I got out of the studio and it was like 230 comments of people being very like you know upset one way or the other about license and my point and you know I was I started an open source company myself in the past and I contributed to a bunch of projects is that yeah llama 2 is not open source but like the open source Institute definition but we just don't have a better definition for like models you know like because it's mostly open source you can use it for a lot of stuff so what's like the and it's not Source available because for a lot of stuff you can use it commercially so how do we find better labels and my point was like look let's figure out what the Better Label is but even though it's not fully open source it's still like three million dollars of like flops donated to the community basically you know who else who else in the open source Community is stepping up and putting 3 million of h100 to make us train this model so I I think like overall netmed is like a very positive thing for the community and then you've seen how much stuff was built on top of it there's like the quantized versions with ggml there's like the context window expansion um there's so much being done by the community that um I I think it was it was great for for everyone uh and by the way three million is the lower uh that's just compute um there's a reasonable estimate from scaliai that the extra fine tune that you could on top of it uh was worth about 15 to 20 million dollars um so that's a lot of money just kind of donated to the community um although they didn't release the data they didn't tell us any of the data sets uh they just say trust us we didn't train on any of your Facebook information which is uh it's the first instance where the models are more open than the data and I think that's a reflection of where the relative shift in value might uh happen um as a result of lava too and so I I don't know you can take that in multiple different directions but I just want to point that out yeah I was gonna say so we first had the the examples I made so we first had the open models open source models which is like rent pajama so the data so have been the training code is open the model weights are open then stability kind of did the same thing with stable LM which is like hey the widths are open but we're not giving you the data you know so you can you can download the model but you cannot retrain it yourself and that llama too it's like we don't give you the data we'll give you the models but you can only use it for for some stuff so there's more and more restriction but like Sean is saying and we talked about this before everybody wants to train their model nobody wants to open source the best data set for X you know which maybe is what more open source people should focus on it's like how to build better specific data sets instead of yet spending giving Jensen Wang another five million dollars of gpus but the model gets more headlines for now you know so that's that's what everybody Adidas yeah and I want to point out it's a reversal of the open source culture they used to get a sequence of openness and you could kind of pick and choose from uh whether it's open code all the way down to open data versus all the way down to uh open weights and you know there's some some barrier to combination I I wrote I wrote this book a long time ago because I don't remember that the five levels um uh but yeah like it's it's very strange and I think it's just it's just a relative uh um discussion of where the money is going um and I think it makes usually shows that compute is becoming commoditized um which yes there's a GPU approach right now uh a100 has sold out everywhere across the board people are commenting all about it uh this month um you know and there's people hoarding compute like nobody's business but as far as the value an AI is concerned it looks like computers is relatively um you know uh commoditized it's actually data that's that that people are kind of safeguarding generously um going all the way back to the history of Open Source models that you lose their AI when they when they train GPT J and GPT Neo as the first reproductions of gpt3 um they they release the data first uh stable diffusion when they train stable diffusion they release live on 500b first uh and that's I think reflectors or like the the normal sequence of events you release the data that anybody's uh the model weights but now now we're just skipping the data part and I think it's just it's fair it's a way to think about yourself you know I think um one of our conversations I think I think it was my Conover when he was talking about comparing our current AI era versus uh the 2000s era in search engines you know all he basically said like all of the public publishable information retrieval research dried up because all those phds went to work at Google and Google just sat on it uh and that it this is now you know a fight for IP um and and I think that is just a very rational way of behavior and I guess like a capitalist AI economy do you think so one of the things that we were talking about before starting with the the code interpreter 4.5 and why or gbt 4.5 and why they might not call it that is the emergence of this sort of regulatory if not pressure certainly Intrigue uh you know do you think that there's potentially an aspect of that when it comes to why people are so jealously safeguarding you know the the data is there more risk for for being open about where the data is actually coming from the the books three examples probably good so MPT trained their model on a data set called bookstree which is 190 000 books something like that um and then people on Twitter were like well this stuff is not you know in the free you know it's under copyright still you just published yeah yeah it's not in the public domain you can just take it and and train on it but the license for some of these books is like kind of blurry you know on like what's fair use and what is it um and so there was like this old thing on Twitter about it and then MPD you know Mosaic first changed the license and they changed it back and um I think Sean uh Sean presser from Luther was just tweeting about this yesterday and he was basically saying look as ml Engineers maybe it's better to not try and be the you know the main ethics night and just say hey look the data's open and let's try it and then maybe people later will say hey please don't use the data and then we can figure it out but like proactively not using all of this stuff can kind of keep the progress back and and you know he's more coming from the side of like a Luther which is like doing this work in public so for them it's like hey you know if you don't want us to train now this is fine but we shouldn't by default not do it um versus if you're meta you know they said the deterring llama on like stuff available on the internet they didn't say the train llama on stuff that is licensed to train on uh it's a it's a small it's a small difference the other piece of this that that I I wanted to sort of circle back to because we kind of breezed over it but I think it's really significant you know we did get a little lost in this conversation around open source definitions and I don't think that's unimportant I think that people are rightly protective when a set of terminology has a particular meaning and a massive Global Corporation sort of tries to like nudge it towards something that is potentially serving their ends versus uh you know actually being by that definition but I also think that your point which is that functionally relative to the rest of the space it probably doesn't super matter because what people mean is almost more about functionally what they can do with it and what it means for the space relative to more closed models and I I think one of the big observations has been that the availability of uh you know from from when llama one was you know fully fully leaked the availability of of all of that has pretty dramatically changed won the evolution of the space over the past few months and two I think from a business standpoint how the big companies and incumbents have thought about this so another big conversation this month going back to sort of the The Venture Capital side of of your life has been the extent to which uh companies or startups are or big companies are not wanting to sort of side on with some startup that's going to offer them you know AI whatever because their technical teams can just go spin up you know sort of their their own version of it because of the the sort of you know availability of these open source tools but you know I guess I'm interested I guess in bringing the the sort of Open Source you know in air quotes side of the conversation into the to the realm of how it has impacted how companies are thinking about you know uh their their development in the in the context of the AI space I think it's just Rising like put it raising the bar on like what you're supposed to offer so I think six nine months ago it was enough to offer a nice UI wrapper around an open AI model today it isn't anymore so that's really the main the main difference it's like what are you doing outside of wrapping the model and people need more and more before they buy versus building yeah I think um it actually moves the area of competition uh towards other parts of productionizing AI applications you know I I think that's probably just a positive um I I feel like um the uh actually the competitive pressure that La The Meta is putting on Open the Eyes is a good thing uh one of the fun predictions that I made was in the next six months ubt opening hour open source tpc3 um which which is not open source and uh I like it's so far behind the state of the art now that it doesn't matter as far as safety is concerned and it basically peeps open AI in the open source AI game uh which which would be nice to have of the things that people have been building um you called out a couple uh context window expansion but have there been any that really stand out to you as super interesting or unexpected or or you know particularly high potential um one of our short short term podcast guests uh the mlc team they were thumb wrapping llama two to run on MacBook gpus so I think that's like the the most interesting Gap right it's like how do we go from paper token to like unlimited local use that's one of the main main things that keep even people like me from like automating a lot of stuff right it's like I don't want to constantly pay open AI to do menial stuff but if I go run this locally and do it even if five times lower I would do it so that's uh that's a super exciting space yeah I would say beyond that there hasn't been that much I mean it's it's only a few weeks old so uh it hasn't been damaged uh emergence coming from it I would I would definitely say um you want to keep the lookout for uh the uh basically what happens in post lab number one which you know keep in mind it was only in February um the same thing that happened with Acuna alpaca and all the other sort of instructions to you and sort of research type models um but just more of them because now they are also commercially available um we haven't seen them come out yet but it's it's almost like guarantee that they will um you can also apply all the new techniques uh that have been have emerged since then like Json former because now you have access to all the model leads um to to to llama and I think uh that will also uh create another subset of models that uh basically was only theoretically applicable to sort of research holiday models uh before and so now these will be authored commercially as well um so like yeah nothing nothing like really eye-popping I would say um but but it's been five minutes is that it's yeah it's it's been it's been a very short amount of time uh and the thing of Open Source is that the creativity unlocked um is is very hard to predict and actually I think happens a lot in the uh let's just say the the mess official part of the economy where where I've been focusing a lot on recently on um the sort of AI girlfriend economy which is huge uh I I feel like it's not polite conversation that the amount of um AI girlfriend area has but it's real they're millions of users they're making a lot of money uh and it's just virtually not talked about in in like polite SF circles it feels like one of those areas that's going to be uh an absolute lightning rod when it comes to the societal debates around this technology like you can feel it that that sort of oh you know the people are going to hone in on that as example a of you know a change that they don't like that's my guess at least I don't know like so I have a really crazy longer term prediction like maybe on the order of like 30 to 50 years but um you know yeah a girlfriend for Nobel Peace Prize because it what if it solves the loneliness crisis right what if it cuts the rate of Terror and uh you know school shootings by like or something like that's huge my wife and I have joked about how every generation there's always something like they always think that they're like so far ahead and they think that there's nothing that their kids could throw at them that they just like fundamentally won't get and without fail every generation has something that seems just totally normal to them that their parents generation writ large just like has such a hard time with and we're like it's probably gonna be like AI girlfriends and boyfriends we're gonna be like yeah but they're not real they're like yeah but it's real to me you know they're having debates with our future 13 year old or kids are only four and two now so it feels like maybe the right timeline yeah I I've heard actually of all people Matthew McConaughey on the Lexus and what what yeah you was he was great shout out shout out shout out Matt um but they were talking about they were kind of talking about this and they were noodle in the this idea of like computers helping us being better so kind of like we have computers learn how to play chess and then we all got better at chess by using the computers to like learn and like experiment uh they were talking about similarly in interpersonal relationship maybe it does you know it doesn't have to be you shut off from from humans but it's like using some of these models and some of these things to actually like learn you know how to better interact with people and if you're like shy and an introvert it's like okay I can like try these jokes on like these conversation points with a model and like you know it teaches me hey that's not okay to say or like you know you should maybe be more open or or I don't know but I think that's a more wholesome view of it than like everybody just kind of runs away from society and that's like 10 AI friends and doesn't talk to humans anymore what's it's much less sexy to just say like AI friends right that even though like there's the if you look at the possibility set you know the idea that people might have this sort of uh to your point like conversational partner that helps them effectively work through their own things in this safe space that doesn't necessarily relate to romantic attachment just because the movie Her came out right right it can just be a panel of experts uh and I I've uh I had I do have plans to build uh you know a small CEO which is uh it's my own boss um and just for me to check it um and actually we'll flag out just lifting various services so you come a lot you come across a lot of AI Engineers who are interested in building mental wellness products and a lot of these will take the form of some kind of Journal um and this will be your most private uh thoughts that you don't really want to send anywhere else um and so actually all these will make advantage of Open Source models because they don't want to set it to open AI um and that makes a ton of sense which is something like I just came across uh from one of my friends uh here in the coordinating space that I have uh where it's it's one of those situations where you can actually try out like having a conversation and having a group of yeah friends chime in and see what that feels like to you uh it's it's the first example I found my past where someone's actually done this super interesting so uh llama and uh code interpreter I think stood out pretty clearly as as really big things to touch um I wanted to check in just as we sort of start to maybe around the corner towards wrapping up Claude 2 uh and anthropic how significant was this in what ways was a significant you know was it something that was sort of meaningful from expanding the capacity set for developers or was it sort of more just a good example of what you can do if you increase the context window but you know that's something that might ultimately become table Stakes later on yeah I could I could maybe speak through this a little bit um so it is significant but not earth shattering or clearly I think it is the first time that Claude as a whole has just been a generally publicly available you used to be on a weakness um yes it has a longer context window but to me more significantly it is anthropic finding its its footholds uh in the very competitive CI landscape you know um anthopics message used to be that we're yes we're number two to open the eye but we're safer you know and that's that's not a super appealing uh thing to to many uh Engineers it is it is very appealing to some uh uh corporations by the way um but uh you know I think I think having the 100K contest window makes them state-of-the-art in one dimension which is very useful uh the ability to upload multiple files I think is super useful as well um and I and actually I have met a number of businesses I'm closer as a source graph who are actually choosing to build with claw 2 API over and above open AI just because they are better at latency better reliability in in better in some form of code synthesis um so I think it's anthropic finding it's foothold finally after a long while uh of being in open the eyeshadow yeah and we use cloud for the uh the transcript and timestamps and the buckets so shout out the 100K context window you know we couldn't do that when we first started the podcast we were like okay how do we trunk this stuff or like gpd4 and and all of that and then Bob was like just put the whole thing in here man and works great so uh that's a good start but I feel like they're always yeah a second second fiddle you know it's like every time there really something people are like cool okay some people like it must be more like okay fine I I feel bad for them because it's like it's really good stuff you know but they just need they just need some uh some help on the marketing side and the community buy-in so I just spent this past weekend at uh the club hackathon which is as far as I know anthropics first hackathon I I treated a pretty well received video where I was I was just eating the hackathon venue at 2 am in the morning and there was just a ton of people hacking there there were like 300 people uh participating uh for Claude And I think it's just the first real developer excitement I've ever seen for enthalpy kid Claude um so I think they're on their way up I think this paves the way for a multi-model future um that is something that a lot of people are betting on um it's just the the odds are stacked against entropic but they're making some Headway um I I do think that you should always be running all your chat side by side against uh tragicia and Claude and maybe mama two um so I I immediately I have a little uh many of our app that does that that uh save all the all the chats across and uh and yeah I can say I can legitimately say that Claude wins about 30 of the time uh as far as any time I give it a task to do I ask it a question um which is not you know doesn't make it number one but it actually is very additive to your overall toolkit of yeah I think you shouldn't use yeah it's certainly the first time that you're if you go on Twitter on any given day you will see people saying things like if you haven't used uh Claude you know for writing you have to try it now or so you know like people who are really who have made a switch who are have no affiliation who are very convinced that it is now part of the the suite of tools that people should really be paying attention to which I think is great where we shouldn't be at a stage yet where we're you know total totally in on one just one tool set I'll also mention I think this month or at least July was when the first inspection of where whether like is too much context not actually a good thing um so there's a there's a pretty famously product I forget the actual title a bit uh that shows a very pronounced new curve in the retrieval abilities of large context models um and so basically if you if if you if the item that is being retrieved is at the start or the end of the context window then it has the best chance of being received but if it's in the middle it has a high chance of being lost um and so is 100k context a good thing are you systematically testing its ability to um to retrieve the correct factual information or are you just looking at a summary and growing yeah it looks good to me you know um I think we will be testing like whether or not it's worth extending it to 100K or a million tokens or infinite tokens uh or do you want to blend uh a short window like 8 000 tokens or 4 000 tokens uh in couple that together with a proper semantic search system uh like the retrieval augmented generation and Vector database companies are doing so I think that that discussion has come up in open source a lot um and basically it I think it matches human memory right like you want to have a short working memory hahaha you know the I was thinking about it the one other obviously big sort of company update that we haven't spoken about yet was around the middle of the month Google bard had a a big set of updates a lot of it was sort of business focused right so it was available in more languages uh it was you know whatever the the sort of from a feature perspective the biggest thing that they were sort of hanging their hat on was around image recognition and sort of this push towards uh towards multimodality but you know did did you have any guys did you guys have any thoughts about that or was that sort of like you know not sort of on the the high priority list as a as an announcement or development this month I I think going back to the point before we're getting to the maturity level of the industry we're like doing like model updates and all this stuff like it's fine but like people need more you know people need more and like that's why I call it interpreter it's like so good right it's not just like oh we made the model A little better like we added this thing it's like this is like a whole new thing if you're playing the model game if not you got to go to the product level and I think Google should start thinking about how to make that work because when I search on Google Maps for certain stuff it's like completely does not work so maybe they should use models to like make that better and then say we're using Bard in Google Maps search uh but yeah I don't know I've kind of I'm kind of tuning off a lot of the single just model announcements so uh so Bart's updates I think the the multi-modality they actually beat gpt4 to releasing a generally available multimodal wall right you can upload an image and have Bard describe it and that's pretty interesting pretty cool um I think uh one of our earliest guests Robo flow uh Brad their CTO was actually doing some comparisons because they have access to a lot of division models and and Bart came up a little bit short but it was pretty good it was it was like close to the state of the art um I would say the problem with Bard is that you can't rely on them having reliable updates because they had a June update I don't actually remember of implicit code execution where they started to ship uh the code interpreter type functionality but in a more limited format if you run the same code the same questions that but advertising the June blog post it's sundarkai advertise in in a video that and tweet it out they no longer worked in the heart so they had a regression that's that was very embarrassing um obviously unintended but uh it's and it shows that it's hard to keep model progress up to date but I think Google has this checkered history riff its products being reliable you know they also killed off Google Adobe rip um and uh and I think that's something that they have to combat which is like yes they're they're trying to ship model progress I've met the bar people they're you know good artist people um but they have struggled to to ship uh products even more than open AI which is frankly embarrassing for a couple of the size of Google outside of the the biggies are there any other sort of key trends or or you know maybe not even key trends but sort of bubbling interest that you guys are noticing in the developer community that aren't necessarily super widely uh seen outside you know one of the things that I keep an eye on is all the auto GPT like things you know in this month we had gbt engineer and we had multi-on who held a hackathon and you know there's a few few things like that but you know not necessarily in the agent space but are there any other themes that you guys are are keeping an eye on let's say uh I I'm sure Alessio can chime in but on on I do keep a relative uh close eye on that agent stuff uh it has not uh died down in terms of the the heat uh even the other GPT team who by the way I work uh on the first floor the building that I work on uh they're hard at work uh shipping the next version and so I think a lot of people are engaging in the dream of agents and um I think like scoping them down to something usable is still a task that uh has not as it has so far eluded every single team so far and uh and it is what it is I think I think uh all these very ambitious goals we are at the very start of of this journey uh the same Journey that maybe self-driving cars took uh in 2012 when when they started doing the darker challenge um and I think the other thing I'll point out interest in terms of uh just overall interest uh I am definitely seeing a lot of uh eval type companies being formed and winning hackathons too um so what what at Utah companies they're they're basically uh companies in that you uh monitor the uh the success of your prompts or your agents and version them and um and and just share them potentially um I I I feel like I can't be more descriptive just because it's hard to um to really describe what they do it's just because they are not very clear about what they do yet um Lang chain launch Lang Smith um and I think that is the first commercial product that nine chain probably you know the the top one or two developer oriented AI projects out there um and that's more observability but also local uh tensorous ebal as well because they Aqua hired in an AI eval projects as well so I was I'll just call out just the general domain of how to eval models um is a very big focus of the developers here again yep yeah we've done um two seats and companies doing agents but they're both verticalized agents so I think the open source motion has been Auto gbt do anything um and now we're seeing a lot of Founders is like hey you know if you take that and then you combine it with like deep industry expertise you can get so many improvements to it and then the other piece of it is how do you do information retrieval so you know in general knowledge like documents everything is kind of flat but when you're in specific vertical say Finance for example um you know if you're looking at the earnings from this quarter like 10 quarters ago like the latest ones are like much more important so how do you start to create this like information hierarchy between documents and then how do you use that instead of doing simple like retrieval from like an embedding store it's like how do you also start to score these things that's another area of of research from from founders oh I'll call out two more things um one more thing that happened this week this month was sdxl uh you know text to image doesn't seem as sexy anymore even though like last year with all the raids um I but I do think like it's it's coming along um I I definitely wish that Google was putting up more of a fight because they actually at the start of the Year released some very interesting Capers that they never followed up on uh that show some really interesting Transformers based uh text image models that I thought was super interesting and then this the other uh element which uh you know I'm just like very fascinated by a lot of the I don't know like the uh uh I I I hesitate to say this but it's actually like the the character and like the um um let's just call they call it character replica and and all the sort of work versions of that um I I do think that a lot of people are hacking on this kind of stuff um the retention metrics on character AI blows away um you know a lot of the uh the metrics that you might see in on traditional social media sites and basically AI native social media is something that is something that that is there's something there that I think people haven't really explored yet and and people are exploring it you know like uh is this company and like you know he's always a few years ahead of it so uh not to keep returning to this theme but I I just think like it's it's definitely coming for a lot of like a lot of the ways that we we deal with things like right now we think co-pilot and we right now we think um uh we've been chat gbt but like uh what what we what we really want to speak to is is uh a way of serializing personality and intelligence um and and potentially that is a that is a leading form of Mind upload um so that Becca is into science fiction but I do see a lot of people working on that yeah I mean we just got a Financial Times report that says that AI personas uh from meta from Facebook could be coming next month they were talking about uh yeah they were talking about airport was there's one one that's Abraham Lincoln one that's like a surfer dude who gives you travel advice so it's it's it's you know the sourcing is three people with knowledge of the project or whatever um and it you know no obviously no confirmation from meta but it's no secret that Zuckerberg has been interested in this stuff and uh you know the the ftp's is actually it's a good overview of why a company like Meadow would care about it in very dollars and cents terms yeah something like and I want to State like the first version of this is very very me like when I first looked at character AI it was like okay I want to talk to Genghis Khan if I'm doing a history class but it's like not it's like what if what a 10 year old would enjoy you know um but I think the the various iterations of this professionally would be very interesting so on the developer side of this I have been calling for the development of agent clouds which are clouds that are specifically uh optimized not for uh human use but for uh EI agent teams and that is a form of character right it's a character is it with the different environments uh with the different dependencies pre-installed uh that can be programmatically controlled can get programmatic feedback to agents um and uh and there's a protocol for me um that some of the leading figures like Auto gbt and e2b are creating that um lets agents run clouds um this would this would definitely terrify the AI safety people because we have gone from like running them on a single machine towards running you know clusters originally um but it's happening all right so so let's talk about what comes next do you guys have any predictions for August or if not predictions just things that you're watching most closely go ahead Alice uh let me let me think and I think Sean is usually good at like the super long term prediction some more uh pragmatic I don't know you know yeah he's more like he he like minimum like 12 to 24 months um I I think like for me probably starting to see more public talk about open source models in production with people using that as a differentiator I think right now a lot of it is kind of like oh these models are there but nobody's really saying oh I moved away from opening I'm using this but in our we run a early adopters Community with about 1500 kind of like a Fortune 500 large companies leaders and some of them were like oh we deployed dolly in production and we're using it we're not writing a blog post about it um so I think right now the perception is still everybody's using open Ai and the open source models are like really toys but I think we're gonna get into September and you know you're not going to see a lot of announcements in August proper but I think a lot of people are gonna spend August getting these models ready and then going into end of the year and say hey we're here too you know we're using the open models like we don't need open AI um I think right now there's still not not a lot of a lot of public talk about that so excited to to see more uh yeah I'm a little bit uh as for myself uh this is very self-interested obviously but we had to edit an agenda you know I wrote about the the rise of the AI engineer I mean I think it's definitely happening as we speak um I I have seen multiple tags like people tag me multiple times a day on like uh how they're reorienting their careers I think people professionalizing around this and going from essentially like informal groups and slack channels and meetups and stuff towards uh certifications and courses and job titles and actual AI teams in every single company I think is happening um I I just got notification like two days ago that the uh you know in meta apparently you can sort of name your name a job site title whatever you want internally uh and so they emerged as the first AI engineer within meta uh has has been announced and uh so I think I think as far as you know the near-term I do see this career this profession come into place um that I've been forecasting for uh for a little bit and I'm excited to help it along awesome well guys great conversation tons of interesting stuff happening obviously um I do think it you know ironically I think it's a relatively more quiet time in some ways than than it even was and you know my my prediction for August is that we're going to see the extension of that we're going to see sort of the the biggest breath that we've had at least from a from a feeling perspective maybe since Chachi PT but then we're gonna rage back in in September you got Facebook connects in September you've got sort of just the return to business that everyone does after August um but of course I think you know the hackathons aren't going to stop in the Bay Area so people are going to keep building and it's entirely possible that something you know hits in the next four weeks that that totally changes that be exciting to see looking forward Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

FlashAttention was first published by Tri Dao in May 2022 and it had a deep impact in the large language models space. Most open models you’ve heard of (RedPajama, MPT, LLaMA, Falcon, etc) all leverage it for faster inference. Tri came on the podcast to chat about FlashAttention, the newly released FlashAttention-2, the research process at Hazy Lab, and more. This is the first episode of our “Papers Explained” series, which will cover some of the foundational research in this space. Our Discord also hosts a weekly Paper Club, which you can signup for here. How does FlashAttention work?The paper is titled “FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness”. There are a couple keywords to call out:* “Memory Efficient”: standard attention memory usage is quadratic with sequence length (i.e. O(N^2)). FlashAttention is sub-quadratic at O(N). * “Exact”: the opposite of “exact” in this case is “sparse”, as in “sparse networks” (see our episode with Jonathan Frankle for more). This means that you’re not giving up any precision.* The “IO” in “IO-Awareness” stands for “Input/Output” and hints at a write/read related bottleneck. Before we dive in, look at this simple GPU architecture diagram:The GPU has access to three memory stores at runtime:* SRAM: this is on-chip memory co-located with the actual execution core. It’s limited in size (~20MB on an A100 card) but extremely fast (19TB/s total bandwidth)* HBM: this is off-chip but on-card memory, meaning it’s in the GPU but not co-located with the core itself. An A100 has 40GB of HBM, but only a 1.5TB/s bandwidth. * DRAM: this is your traditional CPU RAM. You can have TBs of this, but you can only get ~12.8GB/s bandwidth, which is way too slow.Now that you know what HBM is, look at how the standard Attention algorithm is implemented:As you can see, all 3 steps include a “write X to HBM” step and a “read from HBM” step. The core idea behind FlashAttention boils down to this: instead of storing each intermediate result, why don’t we use kernel fusion and run every operation in a single kernel in order to avoid memory read/write overhead? (We also talked about kernel fusion in our episode with George Hotz and how PyTorch / tinygrad take different approaches here)The result is much faster, but much harder to read:As you can see, FlashAttention is a very meaningful speed improvement on traditional Attention, and it’s easy to understand why it’s becoming the standard for most models.This should be enough of a primer before you dive into our episode! We talked about FlashAttention-2, how Hazy Research Group works, and some of the research being done in Transformer alternatives.Show Notes:* FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness (arXiv)* FlashAttention-2* Together AI* From Deep Learning to Long Learning* The Hardware Lottery by Sara Hooker* Hazy Research* Is Attention All You Need?* Nvidia CUTLASS 3* SRAM scaling slows* Transformer alternatives:* S4* Hyena* Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)Timestamps:* Tri's background [00:00:00]* FlashAttention’s deep dive [00:02:18]* How the Hazy Research group collaborates across theory, systems, and applications [00:17:21]* Evaluating models beyond raw performance [00:25:00]* FlashAttention-2 [00:27:00]* CUDA and The Hardware Lottery [00:30:00]* Researching in a fast-changing market [00:35:00]* Promising transformer alternatives like state space models and RNNs [00:37:30]* The spectrum of openness in AI models [00:43:00]* Practical impact of models like LLAMA2 despite restrictions [00:47:12]* Incentives for releasing open training datasets [00:49:43]* Lightning Round [00:53:22]Transcript:Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO-in-Residence at Decibel Partners. Today we have no Swyx, because he's in Singapore, so it's a one-on-one discussion with Tri Dao. Welcome! [00:00:24]Tri: Hi everyone. I'm Tri Dao, excited to be here. [00:00:27]Alessio: Tri just completed his PhD at Stanford a month ago. You might not remember his name, but he's one of the main authors in the FlashAttention paper, which is one of the seminal work in the Transformers era. He's got a lot of interest from efficient transformer training and inference, long range sequence model, a lot of interesting stuff. And now you're going to be an assistant professor in CS at Princeton next year. [00:00:51]Tri: Yeah, that's right. [00:00:52]Alessio: Yeah. And in the meantime, just to get, you know, a low pressure thing, you're Chief Scientist at Together as well, which is the company behind RedPajama. [00:01:01]Tri: Yeah. So I just joined this week actually, and it's been really exciting. [00:01:04]Alessio: So what's something that is not on the internet that people should know about you? [00:01:09]Tri: Let's see. When I started college, I was going to be an economist, so I was fully on board. I was going to major in economics, but the first week I was at Stanford undergrad, I took a few math classes and I immediately decided that I was going to be a math major. And that kind of changed the course of my career. So now I'm doing math, computer science, AI research. [00:01:32]Alessio: I had a similar thing. I started with physics and then I took like a programming course and I was like, I got to do computer science. I don't want to do physics. So FlashAttention is definitely, everybody's using this. Everybody loves it. You just released FlashAttention 2 last week. [00:01:48]Tri: Yeah. Early this week on Monday. Yeah. [00:01:53]Alessio: You know, AI time. Things move fast. So maybe let's run through some of the FlashAttention highlights, some of the innovation there, and then we can dive into FlashAttention 2. So the core improvement in FlashAttention is that traditional attention is a quadratic sequence length. And to the two, FlashAttention is linear, which obviously helps with scaling some of these models. [00:02:18]Tri: There are two factors there. So of course the goal has been to make attention go faster or more memory efficient. And ever since attention became popular in 2017 with the Transformer paper, lots and lots of folks have been working on this. And a lot of approaches has been focusing on approximating attention. The goal is you want to scale to longer sequences. There are tons of applications where you want to do that. But scaling to longer sequences is difficult because attention scales quadratically in sequence length on both runtime and memory, as you mentioned. So instead of trying to approximate attention, we were trying to figure out, can we do the same computation and maybe be more memory efficient? So in the end, we ended up being the memory is linear in sequence length. In terms of computation, it's still quadratic, but we managed to make it much more hardware friendly. And as a result, we do get wall clock speed up on the order of 2 to 4x, which really helps because that just means that you'll be able to train with 2 to 4x longer sequence length for the same cost without doing any approximations. As a result, lots of folks have been using this. The thing is available in a lot of libraries that do language model training or fine tuning. [00:03:32]Alessio: And the approximation thing is important because this is an exact thing versus a sparse. So maybe explain a little bit the difference there. [00:03:40]Tri: For sure. So in addition, essentially you compute pairwise similarity between every single element in a sequence against each other. So there's been other approaches where instead of doing all that pairwise computation, you only compute similarity for some pairs of elements in the sequence. So you don't do quadratic number of comparison. And this can be seen as some form of sparsity. Essentially you're ignoring some of the elements. When you write down the matrix, you essentially say, OK, I'm going to pretend there's zero. So that has some benefits in terms of runtime and memory. But the trade-off is that it tends to do worse in terms of quality because you're essentially approximating or ignoring some elements. And I personally have worked on this as well for a few years. But when we talk to practitioners who actually train models, especially at large scale, they say, tend not to use these approximate attention methods. Because it turns out, this was surprising to me at the time, was that these approximation methods, even though they perform fewer computation, they tend to not be faster in walk-on time. So this was pretty surprising because back then, I think my background was more on the theoretical side. So I was thinking of, oh, how many flops or floating point operations are you performing? And hopefully that correlates well with walk-on time. But I realized that I was missing a bunch of ideas from the system side where flops or floating point operations don't necessarily correlate with runtime. There are other factors like memory reading and writing, parallelism, and so on. So I learned a ton from just talking to systems people because they kind of figured this stuff out a while ago. So that was really eye-opening. And then we ended up focusing a lot more on memory reading and writing because that turned out to be the majority of the time when you're doing attention is reading and writing memory. [00:05:34]Alessio: Yeah, the I.O. awareness is probably one of the biggest innovations here. And the idea behind it is, like you mentioned, the FLOPS growth of the cards have been going up, but the memory bandwidth, not as much. So I think maybe that was one of the assumptions that the original attention paper had. So talk a bit about how that came to be as an idea. It's one of those things that like in insight, it's like, obviously, why are we like rewriting to like HBM every time, you know, and like once you change it, it's clear. But what was that discovery process? [00:06:08]Tri: Yeah, in hindsight, a lot of the ideas have already been there in the literature. And I would say is it was somehow at the intersection of both machine learning and systems. And you kind of needed ideas from both sides. So on one hand, on the system side, so lots of systems folks have known that, oh, you know, kernel fusion is great. Kernel fusion just means that instead of performing, you know, loading the same element, instead of performing an operation, write it down, load it back up and perform the second operation, you just load it once, perform two operations and then write it down again. So that saves you kind of memory read and write in the middle there. So kernel fusion has been a classic. There's been other techniques from the system side, like tiling, where you perform things in the form of computations in block, again, so that you can load it into a really fast memory. Think of it as a cache. And this is, again, classical computer science ideas, right? You want to use the cache. So the system folks have been thinking about these ideas for a long time, and they apply to attention as well. But there were certain things in attention that made it difficult to do a complete kernel fusion. One of which is there is this softmax operation in the middle, which requires you to essentially sum across the row of the attention matrix. So it makes it difficult to kind of break it, because there's this dependency. So it makes it difficult to break things into a block. So on the system side, people have been thinking about these ideas, but it's been difficult to kind of do kernel fusion for the entire operation. On the machine learning side, people have been thinking more algorithmically. They say, okay, either we can approximate attention, or there's this trick called the online softmax trick, which says that because of softmax, the way it's written mathematically, you can actually break it up into smaller pieces, do some rescaling, and still get the right answer. So this online softmax trick has been around for a while. I think there was a paper from NVIDIA folks back in 2018 about this. And then there was a paper from Google. So Marcus, Rob, and Stats wrote a paper late 2021 on using this online softmax trick to break attention up into smaller pieces. So a lot of the ideas were already there. But it turns out, you kind of need to combine ideas from both sides. So you need to understand that, hey, we want to do kernel fusion to reduce memory written writes. But we also need this online softmax trick to be able to break the softmax into smaller pieces so that a lot of the systems tricks kind of carry through. We saw that, and it was kind of a natural idea that we ended up using ideas from both sides, and it ended up working pretty well. Yeah. [00:08:57]Alessio: Are there any downsides to kernel fusion? If I think about databases and the reasons why we have atomic operations, you know, it's like, you have observability and fallback in between them. How does that work with attention? Is there anything that we lose by fusing the operations? [00:09:13]Tri: Yeah, I think mostly on the practical side is that you lose a little bit of flexibility in the sense that, hey, now you have, for example, faster attention, it's just a subroutine that you would call to do attention. But as a researcher, let's say you don't want that exact thing, right? You don't want just attention, let's say you want some modification to attention. You want to do, hey, I'm going to multiply the query and key, but then I'm going to do this extra thing before I carry on. So kernel fusion just means that, okay, we have a subroutine that does the entire thing. But if you want to experiment with things, you won't be able to use that fused kernel. And the answer is, can we have a compiler that then automatically does a lot of this kernel fusion? Lots of compiler folks are thinking about this, either with a new language or you can embed it in PyTorch. PyTorch folks have been working on this as well. So if you write just your code in PyTorch and they can capture the graph, can they generate code that will fuse everything together? That's still ongoing, and it works for some cases. But for attention, because of this kind of softmax rewriting stuff, it's been a little bit more difficult. So maybe in a year or two, we'll have compilers that are able to do a lot of these optimizations for you. And you don't have to, for example, spend a couple months writing CUDA to get this stuff to work. Awesome. [00:10:41]Alessio: And just to make it clear for listeners, when we say we're not writing it to memory, we are storing it, but just in a faster memory. So instead of the HBM, we're putting it in the SRAM. Yeah. [00:10:53]Tri: Yeah. [00:10:54]Alessio: Maybe explain just a little bit the difference there. [00:10:56]Tri: Yeah, for sure. This is kind of a caricature of how you think about accelerators or GPUs in particular, is that they have a large pool of memory, usually called HBM, or high bandwidth memory. So this is what you think of as GPU memory. So if you're using A100 and you list the GPU memory, it's like 40 gigs or 80 gigs. So that's the HBM. And then when you perform any operation, you need to move data from the HBM to the compute unit. So the actual hardware unit that does the computation. And next to these compute units, there are on-chip memory or SRAM, which are much, much smaller than HBM, but much faster. So the analogy there is if you're familiar with, say, CPU and RAM and so on. So you have a large pool of RAM, and then you have the CPU performing the computation. But next to the CPU, you have L1 cache and L2 cache, which are much smaller than DRAM, but much faster. So you can think of SRAM as the small, fast cache that stays close to the compute unit. Physically, it's closer. There is some kind of asymmetry here. So HBM is much larger, and SRAM is much smaller, but much faster. One way of thinking about it is, how can we design algorithms that take advantage of this asymmetric memory hierarchy? And of course, lots of folks have been thinking about this. These ideas are pretty old. I think back in the 1980s, the primary concerns were sorting. How can we sort numbers as efficiently as possible? And the motivating example was banks were trying to sort their transactions, and that needs to happen overnight so that the next day they can be ready. And so the same idea applies, which is that they have slow memory, which was hard disk, and they have fast memory, which was DRAM. And people had to design sorting algorithms that take advantage of this asymmetry. And it turns out, these same ideas can apply today, which is different kinds of memory. [00:13:00]Alessio: In your paper, you have the pyramid of memory. Just to give people an idea, when he says smaller, it's like HBM is like 40 gig, and then SRAM is like 20 megabytes. So it's not a little smaller, it's much smaller. But the throughput on card is like 1.5 terabytes a second for HBM and like 19 terabytes a second for SRAM, which is a lot larger. How do you think that evolves? So TSMC said they hit the scaling limits for SRAM, they just cannot grow that much more. HBM keeps growing, HBM3 is going to be 2x faster than HBM2, I think the latest NVIDIA thing has HBM3. How do you think about the future of FlashAttention? Do you think HBM is going to get fast enough when maybe it's not as useful to use the SRAM? [00:13:49]Tri: That's right. I think it comes down to physics. When you design hardware, literally SRAM stays very close to compute units. And so you don't have that much area to essentially put the transistors. And you can't shrink these things too much. So just physics, in terms of area, you don't have that much area for the SRAM. HBM is off-chip, so there is some kind of bus that essentially transfers data from HBM to the compute unit. So you have more area to essentially put these memory units. And so yeah, I think in the future SRAM probably won't get that much larger, because you don't have that much area. HBM will get larger and faster. And so I think it becomes more important to design algorithms that take advantage of this memory asymmetry. It's the same thing in CPU, where the cache is really small, the DRAM is growing larger and larger. DRAM could get to, I don't know, two terabytes, six terabytes, or something, whereas the cache stays at, I don't know, 15 megabytes or something like that. I think maybe the algorithm design becomes more and more important. There's still ways to take advantage of this, I think. So in the future, I think flash attention right now is being used. I don't know if in the next couple of years, some new architecture will come in and whatnot, but attention seems to be still important. For the next couple of years, I still expect some of these ideas to be useful. Not necessarily the exact code that's out there, but I think these ideas have kind of stood the test of time. New ideas like IO awareness from back in the 1980s, ideas like kernel fusions, tiling. These are classical ideas that have stood the test of time. So I think in the future, these ideas will become more and more important as we scale models to be larger, as we have more kinds of devices, where performance and efficiency become much, much more important. [00:15:40]Alessio: Yeah, and we had Jonathan Frankle on the podcast, and if you go to issattentionallyouneed.com, he has an outstanding bet, and he does believe that attention will be the state of the art architecture still in a few years. Did you think flash attention would be this popular? I'm always curious on the research side, you publish a paper, and obviously you know it's great work, but sometimes it just kind of falls flat in the industry. Could you see everybody just starting to use this, or was that a surprise to you? [00:16:11]Tri: Certainly, I didn't anticipate the level of popularity. Of course, we were extremely happy to have people using this stuff and giving us feedback and so on, and help us improve things. I think when we were writing the paper, I remember sending an email to one of my advisors, and like, hey, I'm excited about this paper, but I think the most important thing will be the artifact, which is the code. So I knew that the code will be valuable. So we kind of focus a lot on the code and make sure that the code is usable and as fast as can be. Of course, the idea, the paper presents the ideas and explain it and have experiments that validate the idea, but I knew that the artifact or the code was also pretty important. And that turned out to be the right focus, which is, you know, we put out the paper, we release the code and continue working on the code. So it's a team effort with my co-authors as well. [00:17:07]Alessio: We mentioned Hazy Research a bunch of times on the podcast before. I would love for you to spend five minutes just talking about how does the group work? How do people get together? How do you bounce ideas off of each other? Yeah. [00:17:21]Tri: So Hazy Research is a research group at Stanford led by one of my advisors, Chris Re. I love the people there. It was one of the best experiences I had. They've made my PhD so much more enjoyable. And I think there are a couple of ways that the group has been working pretty well. So one is, I think there's a diverse pool of people who either, you know, some of them focus on algorithms and theory, some of them focus on building systems, some of them focus on applications. And as a result, there is this flow of idea. So as an example, some of us were working on like more algorithms and theory, and then we can talk to the folks building systems and say, hey, let's try it out and let's put it in the systems and see how it is. And there you will get feedback from systems folks. They will say, hey, we implemented this, or we tried this and this is where it doesn't work, something like that. And once we put it in the systems, the application folks can use the algorithm or new methods or new models. And we again get great feedback from them because the application folks, for example, some of my good friends, they focus on medical imaging or seizure detection. And that is the problem they care about. And if your method doesn't work on the task they care about, they will tell you. Whereas I think a lot of people in machine learning, they're a little bit more flexible. So they will be like, hey, it doesn't work on seizure detection. Let's try some other task, right? But having that direct feedback of like, hey, it doesn't work there, let's figure out why. I think that that feedback allows us to do better work. And I think that kind of process of exchanging ideas, validating it in a real system so that applications folks can try it out and give you feedback. That cycle has been very, very useful. And so that's one, having a diverse group of people. The other one is, and this is something I really appreciate from advice from Chris was try to understand the fundamental, right? And he's happy letting me go off and read some textbooks and playing with things because I think a lot of research ideas come from understanding the old literature and see how it fits with the new landscape. And so if you just new archive papers every day, that's great, but you also need to read textbooks. And that's one advice I got from Chris, which is understand the fundamentals. And I think that allows us to do more impactful work. [00:19:46]Alessio: How do you think about academia versus industry? I feel like AI / Machine Learning has been an area where up until three, four years ago, most of the cutting edge work was being done in academia. And now there's all these big industry research labs. You're obviously going to Princeton, so you're an academia believer. How should people think about where to go? Say I'm doing my master's, I have to decide between doing a PhD and going into OpenAI Anthropic. How should I decide? [00:20:15]Tri: I think they kind of play a complementary role, in my opinion. Of course, I also was considering different paths as well. So I think right now, scaling matters a lot, especially when you talk about language models and AI and so on. Scaling matters a lot. And that means that you need compute resources and you need infrastructure and you need engineers time. And so industry tends to have an advantage when it comes to scaling things. But a lot of the ideas actually came from academia. So let's take Attention, which got popular with the Transformer in 2017. Attention actually has been around for a while. So I think the first mention was in 2014, a paper from Bernadot and others and Yoshua Bengio, which is coming from academia. A lot of ideas did come from academia. And scaling things up, of course, I think OpenAI has been great at scaling things up. That was the bet that they made after, I think, GPT-2. So they saw that scaling these things up to back then was 1.5 billion parameter seemed to give you amazing capabilities. So they really committed to that. They really committed to scaling things. And that turned out to be, it's been a pretty successful bet. I think for academia, we're still trying to figure out exactly what we're doing in this shifting landscape. And so lots of folks have been focusing on, for example, evaluation. So I know the Stanford Center for Foundation Model led by Percy, they have this benchmark called HELM, which is this holistic benchmark. So trying to figure out, okay, characterizing the landscape of different kinds of models, what people should evaluate, what people should measure, and things like that. So evaluation is one role. The other one is understanding. So this has happened historically where there's been some development in the industry and academia can play a role in explaining, understanding. They have the luxury to slow down trying to understand stuff, right? So lots of paper on understanding what's really going on, probing these models, and so on. I think I'm not as familiar with the NLP literature, but my impression is there's a lot of that going on in the NLP conferences, which is understanding what these models are doing, what capabilities they have, and so on. And the third one I could see is that the academia can take more risky bets in the sense that we can work on stuff that is quite different from industry. I think industry, my impression is you have some objective. You're trying to say, hey, for this quarter, we want to scale the model in this particular way. Next quarter, we want the model to have these capabilities. You're trying to get objectives that maybe, I don't know, 70% that will work out because it's important for the company's direction. I think for academia, the way things work is you have many, many researchers or PhD students, and they're kind of pursuing independent directions. And they have a little bit more flexibility on, hey, I'm going to try out this seemingly crazy idea and see, let's say there's a 30% chance of success or something. And however you define success, for academia, a lot of the time, success just means like, hey, we found something interesting. That could eventually go into industry through collaboration and so on. So I do see academia and industry kind of playing complementary roles. And as for someone choosing a career, I think just more and more generally, industry would be probably better in terms of compensation, in terms of probably work-life balance. But my biased perspective is that maybe academia gives you a little bit more freedom to think and understand things. So it probably comes down to personal choice. I end up choosing to be a professor next year at Princeton. But of course, I want to maintain a relationship with industry folks. I think industry folks can provide very valuable feedback to what we're doing in academia so that we understand where the field is moving because some of the directions are very much influenced by what, for example, OpenAI or Google is doing. So we want to understand where the field is moving. What are some promising applications? And try to anticipate, okay, if the field is moving like this, these applications are going to be popular. What problems will be important in two, three years? And then we try to start thinking about those problems so that hopefully in two, three years, we have some of the answers to some of these problems in two, three years. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But as long as we do interesting things in academia, that's the goal. [00:25:03]Alessio: And you mentioned the eval side. So we did a Benchmarks 101 episode. And one of the things we were seeing is sometimes the benchmarks really influence the model development. Because obviously, if you don't score well on the benchmarks, you're not going to get published and you're not going to get funded. How do you think about that? How do you think that's going to change now that a lot of the applications of these models, again, is in more narrow industry use cases? Do you think the goal of the academia eval system is to be very broad and then industry can do their own evals? Or what's the relationship there? [00:25:40]Tri: Yeah, so I think evaluation is important and often a little bit underrated. So it's not as flashy as, oh, we have a new model that can do such and such. But I think evaluation, what you don't measure, you can't make progress on, essentially. So I think industry folks, of course, they have specific use cases that their models need to do well on. And that's what they care about. Not just academia, but other groups as well. People do understand what are some of the emerging use cases. So for example, now one of the most popular use cases is Chatbot. And then I think folks from Berkeley, some of them are from Berkeley, call them MLCs. They set up this kind of Chatbot arena to essentially benchmark different models. So people do understand what are some of the emerging use cases. People do contribute to evaluation and measurement. And as a whole, I think people try to contribute to the field and move the field forward, albeit that maybe slightly different directions. But we're making progress and definitely evaluation and measurement is one of the ways you make progress. So I think going forward, there's still going to be just more models, more evaluation. We'll just have better understanding of what these models are doing and what capabilities they have. [00:26:56]Alessio: I like that your work has been focused on not making benchmarks better, but it's like, let's just make everything faster. So it's very horizontal. So FlashAttention 2, you just released that on Monday. I read in the blog post that a lot of the work was also related to some of the NVIDIA library updates. Yeah, maybe run us through some of those changes and some of the innovations there. Yeah, for sure. [00:27:19]Tri: So FlashAttention 2 is something I've been working on for the past couple of months. So the story is the NVIDIA CUTLASS team, they released a new version of their library, which contains all these primitives to allow you to do matrix multiply or memory loading on GPU efficiently. So it's a great library and I built on that. So they released their version 3 back in January and I got really excited and I wanted to play with that library. So as an excuse, I was just like, okay, I'm going to refactor my code and use this library. So that was kind of the start of the project. By the end, I just ended up working with the code a whole lot more and I realized that, hey, there are these inefficiencies still in Flash Attention. We could change this way or that way and make it, in the end, twice as fast. But of course, building on the library that the NVIDIA folks released. So that was kind of a really fun exercise. I was starting out, it's just an excuse for myself to play with the new library. What ended up was several months of improvement, improving Flash Attention, discovering new ideas. And in the end, we managed to make it 2x faster and now it's pretty close to probably the efficiency of things like matrix multiply, which is probably the most optimized subroutine on the planet. So we're really happy about it. The NVIDIA Cutlass team has been very supportive and hopefully in the future, we're going to collaborate more. [00:28:46]Alessio: And since it's an NVIDIA library, can you only run this on CUDA runtimes? Or could you use this and then run it on an AMD GPU? [00:28:56]Tri: Yeah, so it's an NVIDIA library. So right now, the code we release runs on NVIDIA GPUs, which is what most people are using to train models. Of course, there are emerging other hardware as well. So the AMD folks did implement a version of Flash Attention, I think last year as well, and that's also available. I think there's some implementation on CPU as well. For example, there's this library, ggml, where they implemented the same idea running on Mac and CPU. So I think that kind of broadly, the idea would apply. The current implementation ended up using NVIDIA's library or primitives, but I expect these ideas to be broadly applicable to different hardware. I think the main idea is you have asymmetry in memory hierarchy, which tends to be everywhere in a lot of accelerators. [00:29:46]Alessio: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Sara Hooker's post, like the hardware lottery. There could be all these things that are much better, like architectures that are better, but they're not better on NVIDIA. So we're never going to know if they're actually improved. How does that play into some of the research that you all do too? [00:30:04]Tri: Yeah, so absolutely. Yeah, I think Sara Hooker, she wrote this piece on hardware lottery, and I think she captured really well of what a lot of people have been thinking about this. And I certainly think about hardware lottery quite a bit, given that I do some of the work that's kind of really low level at the level of, hey, we're optimizing for GPUs or NVIDIA GPUs and optimizing for attention itself. And at the same time, I also work on algorithms and methods and transformer alternatives. And we do see this effect in play, not just hardware lottery, but also kind of software framework lottery. You know, attention has been popular for six years now. And so many kind of engineer hours has been spent on making it as easy and efficient as possible to run transformer, right? And there's libraries to do all kinds of tensor parallel, pipeline parallel, if you use transformer. Let's say someone else developed alternatives, or let's just take recurrent neural nets, like LSTM, GRU. If we want to do that and run that efficiently on current hardware with current software framework, that's quite a bit harder. So in some sense, there is this feedback loop where somehow the model architectures that take advantage of hardware become popular. And the hardware will also kind of evolve to optimize a little bit for that kind of architecture and software framework will also evolve to optimize for that particular architecture. Right now, transformer is the dominant architecture. So yeah, I'm not sure if there is a good way out of this. Of course, there's a lot of development. Things like, I think compilers will play a role because compilers allow you to maybe still be much more efficient across different kinds of hardware because essentially you write the same code and compiler will be able to make it run efficiently different kinds of hardware. So for example, there's this language Mojo, they're compiler experts, right? And their bet is AI models will be running on different kinds of devices. So let's make sure that we have really good compilers with a good language that then the compiler can do a good job optimizing for all kinds of devices. So that's maybe one way that you can get out of this cycle. But yeah, I'm not sure of a good way. In my own research, I have to think about both the algorithm new model and how it maps to hardware. So there are crazy ideas that seem really good, but will be really, really difficult to run efficiently. And so as a result, for example, we can't really scale some of the architectures up simply because they're not hardware friendly. I have to think about both sides when I'm working on new models. [00:32:50]Alessio: Yeah. Have you spent any time looking at some of the new kind of like AI chips companies, so to speak, like the Cerebras of the world? Like one of their innovations is co-locating everything on the chip. So you remove some of this memory bandwidth issue. How do you think about that? [00:33:07]Tri: Yeah, I think that's an interesting bet. I think Tesla also has this Dojo supercomputer where they try to have essentially as fast on-chip memory as possible and removing some of these data transfer back and forth. I think that's a promising direction. The issues I could see, you know, I'm definitely not a hardware expert. One issue is the on-chip memory tends to be really expensive to manufacture, much more expensive per gigabyte compared to off-chip memory. So I talked to, you know, some of my friends at Cerebros and, you know, they have their own stack and compiler and so on, and they can make it work. The other kind of obstacle is, again, with compiler and software framework and so on. For example, if you can run PyTorch on this stuff, lots of people will be using it. But supporting all the operations in PyTorch will take a long time to implement. Of course, people are working on this. So I think, yeah, we kind of need these different bets on the hardware side as well. Hardware has, my understanding is, has a kind of a longer time scale. So you need to design hardware, you need to manufacture it, you know, maybe on the order of three to five years or something like that. So people are taking different bets, but the AI landscape is changing so fast that it's hard to predict, okay, what kind of models will be dominant in, let's say, three or five years. Or thinking back five years ago, would we have known that Transformer would have been the dominant architecture? Maybe, maybe not, right? And so different people will make different bets on the hardware side. [00:34:39]Alessio: Does the pace of the industry and the research also influence the PhD research itself? For example, in your case, you're working on improving attention. It probably took you quite a while to write the paper and everything, but in the meantime, you could have had a new model architecture come out and then it's like nobody cares about attention anymore. How do people balance that? [00:35:02]Tri: Yeah, so I think it's tough. It's definitely tough for PhD students, for researchers. Given that the field is moving really, really fast, I think it comes down to understanding fundamental. Because that's essentially, for example, what the PhD allows you to do. It's been a couple of years understanding the fundamentals. So for example, when I started my PhD, I was working on understanding matrix vector multiply, which has been a concept that's been around for hundreds of years. We were trying to characterize what kind of matrices would have theoretically fast multiplication algorithm. That seems to have nothing to do with AI or anything. But I think that was a time when I developed mathematical maturity and research taste and research skill. The research topic at that point didn't have to be super trendy or anything, as long as I'm developing skills as a researcher, I'm making progress. And eventually, I've gotten quite a bit better in terms of research skills. And that allows, for example, PhD students later in their career to quickly develop solutions to whatever problems they're facing. So I think that's just the natural arc of how you're being trained as a researcher. For a lot of PhD students, I think given the pace is so fast, maybe it's harder to justify spending a lot of time on the fundamental. And it's tough. What is this kind of explore, exploit kind of dilemma? And I don't think there's a universal answer. So I personally spend some time doing this kind of exploration, reading random textbooks or lecture notes. And I spend some time keeping up with the latest architecture or methods and so on. I don't know if there's a right balance. It varies from person to person. But if you only spend 100% on one, either you only do exploration or only do exploitation, I think it probably won't work in the long term. It's probably going to have to be a mix and you have to just experiment and kind of be introspective and say, hey, I tried this kind of mixture of, I don't know, one exploration paper and one exploitation paper. How did that work out for me? Should I, you know, having conversation with, for example, my advisor about like, hey, did that work out? You know, should I shift? I focus more on one or the other. I think quickly adjusting and focusing on the process. I think that's probably the right way. I don't have like a specific recommendation that, hey, you focus, I don't know, 60% on lecture notes and 40% on archive papers or anything like that. [00:37:35]Alessio: Let's talk about some Transformer alternatives. You know, say Jonathan Franco loses his bet and Transformer is not the state of the art architecture. What are some of the candidates to take over? [00:37:49]Tri: Yeah, so this bet is quite fun. So my understanding is this bet between Jonathan Franco and Sasha Rush, right? I've talked to Sasha a bunch and I think he recently gave an excellent tutorial on Transformer alternatives as well. So I would recommend that. So just to quickly recap, I think there's been quite a bit of development more recently about Transformer alternatives. So architectures that are not Transformer, right? And the question is, can they do well on, for example, language modeling, which is kind of the application that a lot of people care about these days. So there are methods based on state space methods that came out in 2021 from Albert Gu and Curran and Chris Re that presumably could do much better in terms of capturing long range information while not scaling quadratically. They scale sub-quadratically in terms of sequence length. So potentially you could have a much more efficient architecture when sequence length gets really long. The other ones have been focusing more on recurrent neural nets, which is, again, an old idea, but adapting to the new landscape. So things like RWKV, I've also personally worked in this space as well. So there's been some promising results. So there's been some results here and there that show that, hey, these alternatives, either RNN or state space methods, can match the performance of Transformer on language modeling. So that's really exciting. And we're starting to understand on the academic research side, we want to understand, do we really need attention? I think that's a valuable kind of intellectual thing to understand. And maybe we do, maybe we don't. If we want to know, we need to spend serious effort on trying the alternatives. And there's been folks pushing on this direction. I think RWKV scale up to, they have a model at 14 billion that seems pretty competitive with Transformer. So that's really exciting. That's kind of an intellectual thing. We want to figure out if attention is necessary. So that's one motivation. The other motivation is Transformer Alternative could have an advantage in practice in some of the use cases. So one use case is really long sequences. The other is really high throughput of generation. So for really long sequences, when you train with Transformer, with flash attention and so on, the computation is still quadratic in the sequence length. So if your sequence length is on the order of, I don't know, 16K, 32K, 100K or something, which some of these models have sequence length 100K, then you do get significantly slower in terms of training, also in terms of inference. So maybe these alternative architectures could scale better in terms of sequence length. I haven't seen actual validation on this. Let's say an RNN model release with context length, I don't know, 100K or something. I haven't really seen that. But the hope could be that as we scale to long sequences, these alternative architectures could be more well-suited. Not just text, but things like high resolution images, audio, video, and so on, which are emerging applications. So that's one, long sequences. Number two is a high throughput generation, where I can imagine scenarios where the application isn't like an interactive chatbot, but let's say a company wants to batch as many requests as possible on their server, or they're doing offline processing, they're generating stuff based on their internal documents, that you need to process in batch. And the issue with Transformer is that during generation, it essentially needs to keep around all the previous history. It's called the KV cache. And that could take a significant amount of memory, so you can't really batch too much because you run out of memory. I am personally bullish on RNNs. I think RNNs, they essentially summarize the past into a state vector that has fixed size, so the size doesn't grow with the history. So that means that you don't need as much memory to keep around all the previous tokens. And as a result, I think you can scale to much higher batch sizes. And as a result, you can make much more efficient use of the GPUs or the accelerator, and you could have much higher generation throughput. Now, this, I don't think, has been validated at scale. So as a researcher, I'm bullish on this stuff because I think in the next couple of years, these are use cases where these alternatives could have an advantage. We'll just kind of have to wait and see to see if these things will happen. I am personally bullish on this stuff. At the same time, I also spend a bunch of time making attention as fast as possible. So maybe hatching and playing both sides. Ultimately, we want to understand, as researchers, we want to understand what works, why do the models have these capabilities? And one way is, let's push attention to be as efficient as possible. On the other hand, let's push other alternatives to be as efficient at scale, as big as possible, and so that we can kind of compare them and understand. Yeah, awesome. [00:43:01]Alessio: And I think as long as all of this work happens and open, it's a net positive for everybody to explore all the paths. Yeah, let's talk about open-source AI. Obviously, together, when Red Pajama came out, which was an open clone of the LLAMA1 pre-training dataset, it was a big thing in the industry. LLAMA2 came out on Tuesday, I forget. And this week, there's been a lot of things going on, which they call open-source, but it's not really open-source. Actually, we wrote a post about it that was on the front page of Hacker News before this podcast, so I was frantically responding. How do you think about what open-source AI really is? In my mind, in open-source software, we have different levels of open. So there's free software, that's like the GPL license. There's open-source, which is Apache, MIT. And then there's kind of restricted open-source, which is the SSPL and some of these other licenses. In AI, you have the open models. So Red Pajama is an open model because you have the pre-training dataset, you have the training runs and everything. And then there's obviously RandomLens that doesn't make it one-to-one if you retrain it. Then you have the open-weights model that's kind of like StableLM, where the weights are open, but the dataset is not open. And then you have LLAMA2, which is the dataset is not open, the weights are restricted. It's kind of like not really open-source, but open enough. I think it's net positive because it's like $3 million of flops donated to the public. [00:44:32]Tri: How do you think about that? [00:44:34]Alessio: And also, as you work together, what is your philosophy with open-source AI? Right, right. [00:44:40]Tri: Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think about it on maybe more practical terms. So of course, Meta has done an amazing job training LLAMA1, LLAMA2. And for LLAMA2, they make it much less restrictive compared to LLAMA1. Now you can use it for businesses, unless you are a monthly active user or something like that. I think just this change will have a very significant impact in the kind of landscape of open-source AI, where now lots of businesses, lots of companies will be using, I expect will be using things like LLAMA2. They will fine-tune on their own dataset. They will be serving variants or derivatives of LLAMA2. Whereas before, with LLAMA1, it was also a really good model, but your business companies weren't allowed to do that. So I think on a more practical term, it's kind of shifting the balance between a closed-source model like OpenAI and Anthropic and Google, where you're making API calls, right? And maybe you don't understand as much of what the model is doing, how the model is changing, and so on. Versus now, we have a model with open weight that is pretty competitive from what I've seen in terms of benchmarks, pretty competitive with GPT 3.5, right? And if you fine-tune it on your own data, maybe it's more well-suited for your own data. And I do see that's going to shift the balance of it. More and more folks are going to be using, let's say, derivatives of LLAMA2. More and more folks are going to fine-tune and serve their own model instead of calling an API. So that shifting of balance is important because in one way, we don't want just a concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a few companies. So I think that's a really positive development from Meta. Of course, training the model takes a couple of millions of dollars, but engineers have and I'm sure they spend tons of time trying many, many different things. So the actual cost is probably way more than that. And they make the weights available and they allow probably a lot of companies are going to be using this. So I think that's a really positive development. And we've also seen amazing progress on the open source community where they would take these models and they either fine-tune on different kinds of data sets or even make changes to the model. So as an example, I think for LLAMA1, the context lane was limited to 2K. Like a bunch of folks figured out some really simple methods to scale up to like 8K. [00:47:12]Alessio: Like the RoPE. [00:47:13]Tri: Yes. I think the open source community is very creative, right? And lots of people. LLAMA2 will, again, kind of accelerate this where more people will try it out. More people will make tweaks to it and make a contribution and then so on. So overall, I think I see that as still a very positive development for the field. And there's been lots of libraries that will allow you to host or fine-tune these models, like even with quantization and so on. Just a couple of hours after LLAMA2 was released, tons of companies announcing that, hey, it's on our API or hosting and so on and together did the same. So it's a very fast-paced development and just kind of a model with available weights that businesses are allowed to use. I think that alone is already a very positive development. At the same time, yeah, we can do much better in terms of releasing data sets. Data sets tend to be... Somehow people are not incentivized to release data sets. So philosophically, yeah, you want to be as open as possible. But on a practical term, I think it's a little bit harder for companies to release data sets. Legal issues. The data sets released tend to be not as eye-catchy as the model release. So maybe people are less incentivized to do that. We've seen quite a few companies releasing data sets together. Released a red pajama data set. I think Cerebus then worked on that and deduplicate and clean it up and release slim pajama and so on. So we're also seeing positive development on that front, kind of on the pre-training data set. So I do expect that to continue. And then on the fine-tuning data set or instruction tuning data set, I think we now have quite a few open data sets on instruction tuning and fine-tuning. But these companies do pay for human labelers to annotate these instruction tuning data set. And that is expensive. And maybe they will see that as their competitive advantage. And so it's harder to incentivize these companies to release these data sets. So I think on a practical term, we're still going to make a lot of progress on open source AI, on both the model development, on both model hosting, on pre-training data set and fine-tuning data set. Right now, maybe we don't have the perfect open source model since all the data sets are available. Maybe we don't have such a thing yet, but we've seen very fast development on the open source side. I think just maybe this time last year, there weren't as many models that are competitive with, let's say, ChatGPT. [00:49:43]Alessio: Yeah, I think the open data sets have so much more impact than open models. If you think about Elusive and the work that they've done, GPT-J was great, and the Pythia models are great, but the Pyle and the Stack, everybody uses them. So hopefully we get more people to contribute time to work on data sets instead of doing the 100th open model that performs worse than all the other ones, but they want to say they released the model. [00:50:14]Tri: Yeah, maybe the question is, how do we figure out an incentive structure so that companies are willing to release open data sets? And for example, it could be like, I think some of the organizations are now doing this where they are asking volunteers to annotate and so on. And maybe the Wikipedia model of data set, especially for instruction tuning, could be interesting where people actually volunteer their time and instead of editing Wikipedia, add annotation. And somehow they acknowledge and feel incentivized to do so. Hopefully we get to that kind of level of, in terms of data, it would be kind of like Wikipedia. And in terms of model development, it's kind of like Linux where people are contributing patches and improving the model in some way. I don't know exactly how that's going to happen, but based on history, I think there is a way to get there. [00:51:05]Alessio: Yeah, I think the Dolly-15K data set is a good example of a company saying, let's do this smaller thing, just make sure we make it open. We had Mike Conover from Databricks on the podcast, and he was like, people just bought into it and leadership was bought into it. You have companies out there with 200,000, 300,000 employees. It's like, just put some of them to label some data. It's going to be helpful. So I'm curious to see how that evolves. What made you decide to join Together? [00:51:35]Tri: For Together, the focus has been focusing a lot on open source model. And I think that aligns quite well with what I care about, of course. I also know a bunch of people there that I know and trust, and I'm excited to work with them. Philosophically, the way they've been really open with data set and model release, I like that a lot. Personally, for the stuff, for example, the research that I've developed, like we also try to make code available, free to use and modify and so on, contributing to the community. That has given us really valuable feedback from the community and improving our work. So philosophically, I like the way Together has been focusing on open source model. And the nice thing is we're also going to be at the forefront of research and the kind of research areas that I'm really excited about, things like efficient training and inference, aligns quite well with what the company is doing. We'll try our best to make things open and available to everyone. Yeah, but it's going to be fun being at the company, leading a team, doing research on the topic that I really care about, and hopefully we'll make things open to benefit the community. [00:52:45]Alessio: Awesome. Let's jump into the lightning round. Usually, I have two questions. So one is on acceleration, one on exploration, and then a takeaway. So the first one is, what's something that already happened in AI machine learning that you thought would take much longer than it has? [00:53:01]Tri: I think understanding jokes. I didn't expect that to happen, but it turns out scaling model up and training lots of data, the model can now understand jokes. Maybe it's a small thing, but that was amazing to me. [00:53:16]Alessio: What about the exploration side? What are some of the most interesting unsolved questions in the space? [00:53:22]Tri: I would say reasoning in the broad term. We don't really know how these models do. Essentially, they do something that looks like reasoning. We don't know how they're doing it. We have some ideas. And in the future, I think we will need to design architecture that explicitly has some kind of reasoning module in it if we want to have much more capable models. [00:53:43]Alessio: What's one message you want everyone to remember today? [00:53:47]Tri: I would say try to understand both the algorithm and the systems that these algorithms run on. I think at the intersection of machine learning system has been really exciting, and there's been a lot of amazing results at this intersection. And then when you scale models to large scale, both the machine learning side and the system side really matter. [00:54:06]Alessio: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on 3. [00:54:09]Tri: This was great. Yeah, this has been really fun. [00:54:11] Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe