Effort

AI

llm inference optimisation

SHOW HN2024

419points
114comments
#104of 3,515 in 2024
Top 3%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

12 positive, 31 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 3 critical, out of 47 comments about the project. Thread score +0.18.

Idea: 6 for, 1 againstDocs: 2 for, 0 againstExecution: 2 for, 0 againstPerformance: 1 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Interesting, potentially useful idea for inference speed

    From 1 comment
    • Looks like the models are missing on Huggingface, I've logged an issue: https://github.com/kolinko/effort/issues/3
      smcleod on HN

Objections

  • Claims are unverified; quality may collapse at Q8 or smaller models

    From 2 comments
    • Hahah thanks, although I was hoping for a flame to get adrenaline flowing to push through the night :D I also hope there will be an extra knob - or more like knobs, because…
      kolinko on HN
    • Yeah, more tests are needed. I got some feedback on using KL instead of the token similarity - initial tests seem to show that it is workable (compared to Q8), but not awesomely…
      kolinko on HN
  • Inference speed is still slow overall

    From 1 comment
    • It's extremely unlikely anyone will take any of this. Quick take: - it was 15x slower than llama.cpp when I used Apple's new proprietary ML framework on my MacBook - So I made it…
      refulgentis on HN

Requests

  • Test on Q8 quantization

    From 2 comments
    • Per VRAM - not much netter, because it still uses all the weights, just not all the time. I mean - it can also load less weights, but quality seems to degrade quick after…
      kolinko on HN
    • Below Q8 I think it will combine poorly - bucketMul needs to keep a few bits for an index. It can be offset by the fact that the numbers from each bucket are from a limited…
      kolinko on HN
  • Better documentation and clearer writeup

    From 2 comments
    • oh, thanks, I fixed it. No idea what I meant there originally. There are still a few typos on the page, I'll be fixing them tomorrow - it's midnight now, and my mental batteries…
      kolinko on HN
    • It’s explained in detail here: https://kolinko.github.io/effort/equations.html Long story short - I kind of sort them and pick only the top % that would give a highest result.…
      kolinko on HN

Questions

  • How does it compare to existing sparse and approximation methods

    From 2 comments
    • Similar theme, but they skip whole neurons, in my case it’s down to a level of single weights. From my experiment, skipping whole neurons (so whole rows/columns of matrixes)…
      kolinko on HN
    • The whole inference is slow, but it's matrix multiplications that count. They work reliably on all the Macbooks that I tested - at 50% effort it's the same speed as the state of…
      kolinko on HN

Alternatives named

  • Mixture of experts (MoE) models

    From 1 comment
    • I’d say that this expands on MoE really - MoE chooses dynamically which groups of weights may be needed, but it’s whole matrixes. Here it’s ingle weights. Also, this works on top…
      kolinko on HN
  • Llama.cpp

    From 1 comment
    • Hahah, thanks! It was a marathon to get develop this, and I'm glad it reached the front page. The name was proposed by chatgpt :) It claims it doesn't recognise this approach -…
      kolinko on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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