What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

Lerc

This is one of the basic avenues for advancement. Compute, bytes of ram used, bytes in model, bytes accessed per iteration, bytes of data used for training. You can trade the balance if you can find another way to do things, extreme quantisation is but one direction to try. KANs were aiming for more compute and fewer parameters. The recent optimisation project have been pushing at these various properties. Sometimes gains in one comes at the cost of another, but that needn't always be the case.

LoganDark

We will not see memory demand decrease because this will simply allow AI companies to run more instances. They still want an infinite amount of memory at the moment, no matter how AI improves.

fph

Despite the shortage, RAM is still cheaper than mathematicians.

abdelhousni

The same could be said about other IT domain... When you see single webpages that weight by tens of MB you wonder how we came to this.

tornikeo

Sigh. Don't make me tap the sign [1] [1] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

amelius

Can we say something about the compression factor for pure knowledge of these models?

konaraddi

> applying this compression algorithm at scale may significantly relax the memory bottleneck issue. I don’t think they’re going to downsize though, I think the big players are just going to use the freed up memory for more workflows or larger models because the big players want to scale up. It’s a cat and mouse race for the best models.

alienbaby

Ive thought for a while that the real gains now will not come from throwing more hardware at the problem, but advances in mathematical techniques to make things for more efficient.

mustyoshi

The drop in memory stocks seems counterintuitive to me. The demand for memory isn't going to go down, we'll just be able to do more with the same amount of memory.

Yokohiii

> If I were Google, I wouldn’t release research that exposes a competitive advantage. Isn't that a classic tit for tat decision and head for a loss? Excellence and prestige are valuable too. You get those expensive ML for a small discount, public/professional perception, etc. Considering the public communication from Google, that isn't complete sociopathic, they know this war isn't won in one night, they are the only sustainably funded company in the competition. Surely they are at risk with their business, but can either go rampant or focus. They decided to focus.

barbegal

Does the KV cache really grow to use more memory than the model weights? The reduction in overall RAM relies on the KV cache being a substantial proportion of the memory usage but with very large models I can't see how that holds true.

simne

Sure, we need better math, it is obvious. Unfortunately, nobody at big companies know , what exactly math will win, so competition not end. So, researchers will try one solution, then other solution, etc, until find something perfect, or until semiconductors production (Moore's Law) made enough semiconductors to run current models fast enough. I believe, somebody already have silver bullet of ideal AI algorithm, which will lead all us to AGI, when scaled in some big company, but this knowledge is not obvious at the moment.

Bydgoszczo

And maverick 2

exabrial

I was thinking it needs speciality hardware. Sort of like how GPUs were born…

chr15m

Is this something that will show up in Ollama any time soon to increase context size of local models?

imjonse

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PaddyLena

I think the biggest issue isn’t the tool itself, but access and stability. I had more trouble finding reliable AI accounts than using them tbh

signa11

why not, you know, just use LLMs to do this job ?

SphericalCowww

I mean, since GPT-4, I believe the RAM is no longer creating the miracle that the LLM performance scales directly with the model size. At least ChatGPT itself convinced me that any decent-sized company can create a GPT4 equivalent in terms of model size, but limited by service options, like memory cache and hallucination handling. Companies buy RAM simply to ride the stock hype. I am no expert, so this is a shallow take, but I think the global LLM already reaches its limit, and general AGI could only be possible if it's living in the moment, i.e., retraining every minute or so, and associating it with a much smaller device that can observe the surroundings, like a robot or such. Instead of KV cache, I have an idea of using LoRA's instead: having a central LLM unchanged by learning, surrounded by a dozen or thousands of LoRAs, made orthogonal to each other, each competed by weights to be trained every 1 min say. The LLM, since it's a RNN anyway, provides "summarize what your state and goal is at this moment" and trains the LoRAs with the summary along with all the observations and say inputs from the users. The output of the LoRAs feeds back to the LLM for it to decide the weights for further LoRAs training. Anyways, I am just thinking there needs to be a structure change of some kind.

effnorwood

this is exactly correct.