• brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    No, all the weights, all the “data” essentially has to be in RAM. If you “talk to” a LLM on your GPU, it is not making any calls to the internet, but making a pass through all the weights every time a word is generated.

    There are system to augment the prompt with external data (RAG is one word for this), but fundamentally the system is closed.

    • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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      21 days ago

      Yeah, I’ve had decent results running the 7B/8B models, particularly the fine tuned ones for specific use cases. But as ya mentioned, they’re only really good in thier scope for a single prompt or maybe a few follow-ups. I’ve seen little improvement with the 13B/14B models and find them mostly not worth the performance hit.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        Depends which 14B. Arcee’s 14B SuperNova Medius model (which is a Qwen 2.5 with some training distilled from larger models) is really incrtedible, but old Llama 2-based 13B models are awful.

        • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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          21 days ago

          I’ll try it out! It’s been a hot minute, and it seems like there are new options all the time.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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            21 days ago

            Try a new quantization as well! Like an IQ4-M depending on the size of your GPU, or even better, an 4.5bpw exl2 with Q6 cache if you can manage to set up TabbyAPI.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_memory_algorithm

        Unfortunately that’s not really relevant to LLMs beyond inserting things into the text you feed them. For every single word they predict, they make a pass through the multi-gigabyte weights. Its largely memory bound, and not integrated with any kind of sane external memory algorithm.

        There are some techniques that muddy this a bit, like MoE and dynamic lora loading, but the principle is the same.