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michaelgiba

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You surely aren't implying that the model is sentient or has any "desire" to give an answer, right?

The model is a probabilistic machine that was trained to generate completions and then fine tuned to generate chat style interactions. There is an output, given the prompt and weights, that is most likely under the model. That’s what one could call the model’s “desired” answer if you want to anthropomorphize. When you constrain which tokens can be sampled at a given timestep you by definition diverge from that

It’s not surprising that there could be a very slight quality drop off for making the model return its answer in a constrained way. You’re essentially forcing the model to express the actual answer it wants to express in a constrained language.

However I would say two things: 1. I doubt this quality drop couldn’t be mitigated by first letting the model answer in its regular language and then doing a second constrained step to convert that into structured outputs. 2. For the smaller models I have seen instances where the constrained sampling of structured outputs actually HELPS with output quality. If you can sufficiently encode information in the structure of the output it can help the model. It can effectively let you encode simple branching mechanisms to execute at sample time

Interesting idea. Although I wouldn't consider `but restrict the data set to publications from <= year 1600` "easy".

If you did have access to a high-quality pretraining dataset and you could explore training up to 1600, then up to 1610, 1620, ... 1700 and look at how the presence of calculus was learned over that period. Running some tests with the intermediate models to capture the effect

Llamafile Returns 9 months ago

Crazier ideas would be: - extend the concept to also have some sort of “agent mode” where the llamafiles can launch with their own minimal file system or isolated context - detailed profiling of main supported models to ensure deterministic outputs

Llamafile Returns 9 months ago

I’m glad to see llamafile being resurrected. A few things I hope for:

1. Curate a continuously extended inventory of prebuilt llamafiles for models as they are released 2. Create both flexible builds (with dynamic backend loading for cpu and cuda) and slim minimalist builds 3. Upstreaming as much as they can into llama.cpp and partner with the project

A different, darker way to interpret this is computers cannot be held accountable today

If systems (presumably AI-based) were conscious or self-aware they would very much be incentivized not to make mistakes. (Not advocating for this)

There are definitely thresholds you reach that make it difficult to generalize. large cluster setups can differ significantly and actual usability of the clusters makes a big difference too.

However I guess there are some differences like these even in real commodities like oil based on the blend/refinement/producer/geography.

I actually went down nearly this exact same rabbit hole recently. Specifically I was curious why, given all of the demand for GPUs, compute not been commoditized and resold through public markets. This also led me to the Enron's ideas before their collapse :)

One thing I found surprising is how hard it is to discover prices of this compute time in today's world as compared to traditional commodities like oil. A factor could be a difference in regulation, for example in the US I believe there are requirements for reporting energy trades between producers and consumers.

side note: I made this minimal website for tracking these prices which shows some of the disparity: https://computeindex.michaelgiba.com/

I think there are some good points here but IMHO this is overly focused on flawless 100% of the time L5 autonomy. Many autonomous trucking companies can become economically viable without perfection because 1. They aren’t dealing with consumers directly 2. Can control or focus on specific well understood shipping lanes 3. Can provide more human in the loop assistance for tricky situations. In this way trucking is easier than ride sharing because there is a longer on ramp (no pun intended) for companies to improve tech while being viable businesses