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Abhinav Venigalla: commitment

20 May 2023 Latent Space MPT-7B and The Beginning of Context=Infinity — with Jonathan Frankle and Abhinav Venigalla of MosaicML

“We're not gonna train on it. But, we don't like to do that currently because, um, it makes us give up determinism, stuff like that.”

— Abhinav Venigalla

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Speaker
Abhinav Venigalla
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
commitment
Recorded
20 May 2023
Publisher
Latent Space

Transcript context

…Yeah, so when I think about, like, I think back to all the Google fault tolerance papers I read, you know, as an undergrad or grad student mm-hmm. About, you know, building distributed systems. A lot of it is that, you know, Each CPU is doing, say, an individual unit of work. You've got a database that's distributed across your cluster. You wanna make sure that one CPU failing can't, or one machine failing can't, you know, delete data. So you, you replicate it. You know, you have protocols like Paxos where you're literally, you've got state machines that are replicated with, you know, with leaders and backups and things like that. And in this case, you were performing one giant computation where you cannot afford to lose any node. If you lose a node, you lose model state. If you lose a node, you can't continue. It may be that, that in the future we actually, you know, create new versions of a lot of our distributed training libraries that do have backups and where data is replicated so that if you lose a node, you can detect what node you've lost and just continue training without having to stop the run, you know? Pull from a checkpoint. Yeah. Restart again on different hardware. But for now, we're certainly in a world where if anything dies, that's the end of the run and you have to go back and recover from it. Yeah. Like I think a big part, a big word there is like synchronous data pluralism, right? So like, we're basically saying that on every step, every GP is gonna do some work. They're gonna stay in sync with each other and average their, their gradients and continue. Now that there are algorithmic techniques to get around this, like you could say, oh, if a GP dies, just forget about it. All the data that's gonna see, we'll just forget about it. We're not gonna train on it. But, we don't like to do that currently because, um, it makes us give up determinism, stuff like that. Maybe in the future, as you go to extreme scales, we'll start looking at some of those methods. But at the current time it's like, we want determinism. We wanted to have a run that we could perfectly replicate if we needed to. And it was, the goal is figure out how to run it on a big cluster without humans having to babysit it. Babysit it. So as you mentioned, these models are kind of the starting point for a lot of your customers To start, you have a. Inference product. You have a training product. You previously had a composer product that is now kind of not rolled into, but you have like a super set of it, which is like the LLM foundry. How are you seeing that change, you know, like from the usual LOP stack and like how people train things before versus now they're starting from, you know, one of these MPT models and coming from there. Like worship teams think about as they come to you and start their journey.…

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