Just sharing a result of a homelab infrastructure experiment:
I've managed to setup a distributed inference infra at home using a DGX Spark (128GB unified gddr6) and a linux workstation with an RTX 6000 Pro (96GB gddr7) connected via 100Gbps RoCEv2. The model I've used (https://lnkd.in/gx6J7YuB) is about 140GB so could not fit either of the GPU. Full setup and tutorial soon on devquasar.com
Trying something new to keep you ahead of the curve: The 5 AI stories of the week - a weekly curation of the most important AI news you need to know. Do you like it?
The most difficult part was getting the model running in the first place, but the next steps are simple: โ๏ธ Implement sentence splitting, allowing for streamed responses ๐ Multilingual support (only phonemization left)
This work from Chinese startup @MiniMax-AI introduces a novel architecture that achieves state-of-the-art performance while handling context windows up to 4 million tokens - roughly 20x longer than current models. The key was combining lightning attention, mixture of experts (MoE), and a careful hybrid approach.
๐๐ฒ๐ ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐๐:
๐๏ธ MoE with novel hybrid attention: โฃ Mixture of Experts with 456B total parameters (45.9B activated per token) โฃ Combines Lightning attention (linear complexity) for most layers and traditional softmax attention every 8 layers
๐ Outperforms leading models across benchmarks while offering vastly longer context: โฃ Competitive with GPT-4/Claude-3.5-Sonnet on most tasks โฃ Can efficiently handle 4M token contexts (vs 256K for most other LLMs)
๐ฌ Technical innovations enable efficient scaling: โฃ Novel expert parallel and tensor parallel strategies cut communication overhead in half โฃ Improved linear attention sequence parallelism, multi-level padding and other optimizations achieve 75% GPU utilization (that's really high, generally utilization is around 50%)
๐ฏ Thorough training strategy: โฃ Careful data curation and quality control by using a smaller preliminary version of their LLM as a judge!
Overall, not only is the model impressive, but the technical paper is also really interesting! ๐ It has lots of insights including a great comparison showing how a 2B MoE (24B total) far outperforms a 7B model for the same amount of FLOPs.