Researchers from the University of Washington have unveiled Guanaco, an open-source chatbot that aims to rival the performance of ChatGPT while significantly reducing the time and resources required for training. Named after a South American relative of llamas, Guanaco is built on the LLaMA language model and incorporates a novel fine-tuning method called QLoRA.

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The creators of Guanaco claim that it achieves comparable performance to ChatGPT but can be trained in just a single day. This remarkable feat is made possible by QLoRA, a language model fine-tuning technique that substantially reduces the amount of GPU memory needed for training. While ChatGPT requires a whopping 780 GB of GPU memory for a model with 65 billion parameters, Guanaco’s simplest version only requires 5 GB.

With these impressive efficiency gains, Guanaco and similar open-source models are challenging the notion that expensive training is necessary for state-of-the-art language models. The emergence of Guanaco, Alpaca, and other models that train at a fraction of the cost has led to speculation about the future of costly models like GPT.

However, not everyone agrees with this optimistic view of open-source models. A recent study conducted by the University of California has cast doubt on the capabilities of models like alpacas and raised questions about their true potential. Initially, the researchers reached a similar conclusion to the creators of Guanaco: when properly trained, open-source models can rival GPT in capabilities. Further tests revealed a significant limitation. These “Dolly” models, as they are sometimes called, are adept at imitating solutions to problems they have encountered during training. However, they struggle to perform well on tasks they haven’t been explicitly exposed to, lagging behind more advanced models.

This revelation suggests that the millions invested in training GPT and similar models may not have been in vain. While Guanaco and its counterparts demonstrate promising results, there are still areas where more sophisticated models excel. It is worth noting that the research conducted by the University of California challenges the prevailing notion that open-source models can fully replace expensive models like GPT.

As the field of natural language processing evolves, it will be interesting to watch how Guanaco and other open-source models fair against established benchmarks such as ChatGPT. The high rate of innovation and continuous research will, without a question, impact the future of language models and determine which models become the go-to choice for particular applications.

  • Dolly 2.0, the first commercially available open-source 12B Chat-LLM, has been announced by Databricks. This is a significant advance for the machine learning industry, allowing businesses to create effective language models without investing in costly GPU clusters. Databricks engaged 5,000 employees to create their open-source language model, which included EleutherAI’s Pythia-12B language model under an MIT license. Dolly 2.0, as well as the associated code, is available under an MIT license. Dolly 2.0 has the potential to change the industry and is a significant step forward for machine learning.

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