There isn't really such a thing as 'too slow' as an objective fact though. It depends on how much patience and money for electricity you have. In AI image gen circles I see people complaining if a model takes more than 5s to generate an image, and other people on very limited hardware who happily wait half an hour per image. It's hard to make a judgement call about what 'too slow' means. It's quite subjective.
If your training time is measured in years or decades it probably won't be practical.
However, most people in the field don't, because the actual practical utility of training huge models on a single GPU is quite low. (e.g they got 341 tok/s for a 14B model on a single 3090 while with my method I was getting ~1k tok/s on a single 4090; that's still very slow)
Also, there are more tricks one can use to speed up training/lower VRAM usage which they're not using. For example, you don't need any gradient offloading (you can just accumulate the gradients directly into the optimizers' states if you modify your optimizer), you can use Muon instead of Adam (which needs only half of VRAM of Adam), you can use quantization (both for parameters and for the optimizer states; e.g. I found Muon quantized into 4-bit working relatively well), etc.
internetguy•1h ago
This is pretty awesome. The only compute I have at home is an RTX 3080 with 10 GB of VRAM, so I struggle with training larger models (>40M, 50M params). I get OOM errors and have to optimize a lot.
I have a lot more CPU RAM in my PC, and this would likely increase the size of models I can train locally.
weitendorf•43m ago
In the past couple months there's been a kind of explosion in small-models that are occupying a niche in this kind of AI-transcoding space. What I'm hoping we're right on the cusp of achieving is a similar explosion in what I'd call tool-adaptation, where an LLM paired with some mostly-fixed suite of tools and problem cases can trade off some generality for a specialized (potentially hyper-specialized to the company or user) role.
The thing about more transcoding-related tasks is that they in general stay in sync with what the user of the device is actively doing, which will also typically be closely aligned with the capabilities of the user's hardware and what they want to do with their computer. So most people aren't being intentional about this kind of stuff right now, partly out of habit I think, because only just now does it make sense to think of personal computer as "stranded hardware" now that they can be steered/programmed somewhat autonomously.
I'm wondering if with the right approach to MoE on local devices (which local llms are heading towards) we could basically amortize the expensive hit from loading weights in and out of VRAM through some kind of extreme batch use case that users still find useful enough to be worth the latency. LoRa is already really useful for this but obviously sometimes you need more expertise/specialization than just a few layers' difference. Experimenting with this right now. It's the same basic principle as in the paper except less of a technical optimization and more workload optimization. Also it's literally the beginning of machine culture so that's kind of cool
giancarlostoro•37m ago
I'm on the same board, its intimidating to me if I even want to bother training anything at all. Do you mind sharing what kind of training you've done with that GPU? :)
hirako2000•19m ago
I doubt you meant 50M. Rather 50B?
You can only give it a try, but don't get your hopes high on a large context. If their technique works I would guess 8096k context limits would still OOM. 2048 maybe.
I'm extrapolating based on my experiment without this paper's trick to leverage the system memory.