Friday, 5th May 2023
No Moat: Closed AI gets its Open Source wakeup call — ft. Simon Willison (via) I joined the Latent Space podcast yesterday (on short notice, so I was out and about on my phone) to talk about the leaked Google memo about open source LLMs. This was a Twitter Space, but swyx did an excellent job of cleaning up the audio and turning it into a podcast.
Introducing MPT-7B: A New Standard for Open-Source, Commercially Usable LLMs (via) There’s a lot to absorb about this one. Mosaic trained this model from scratch on 1 trillion tokens, at a cost of $200,000 taking 9.5 days. It’s Apache-2.0 licensed and the model weights are available today.
They’re accompanying the base model with an instruction-tuned model called MPT-7B-Instruct (licensed for commercial use) and a non-commercially licensed MPT-7B-Chat trained using OpenAI data. They also announced MPT-7B-StoryWriter-65k+—“a model designed to read and write stories with super long context lengths”—with a previously unheard of 65,000 token context length.
They’re releasing these models mainly to demonstrate how inexpensive and powerful their custom model training service is. It’s a very convincing demo!