Introduction

The original Llama model was released by Meta or Facebook, and it has
been used as a basis for many other large language models.
OpenLLaMA is an open-source reproduction of Meta AI's LLaMA model,
which was released to provide an open reproduction of the Llama model
that can be used commercially. All links related LLaMA project are
provided under 'source' section at end of this article.

What is Open Llama?

Open Llama is an open repository and reproduction of Meta's Llama

large language model. It offers pre-trained PyTorch and Jax weights of
the 7 billion parameter Open Llama model. The project provides
evaluation results and comparisons with the original llama model. It will
provide valuable resources for language models and researchers. A
large community of people will have access to it, making it useful for
various use cases.
The Need for Open Llama for commercial

There has been an explosion of new models in recent months based on

the original Llama model. However, the weights for the original Llama
model are not publicly available and cannot be used for commercial
purposes. The Open Llama project aims to provide an open reproduction
of the Llama model that can be used commercially.

Training Data Set

The Open Llama project has released a 7 billion parameter model

trained on 200 billion tokens. The 7 billion parameter Open Llama model
has been trained on a large corpus of data including web-trained
sources, books, and other text sources.

Training Process

This is an early release of a public review, with plans to retrain the model
with a much larger data set in the future. The project uses exactly the
same architecture, context length, number of training steps, learning rate
schedule, and optimization as in the original Llama paper. However,
since they do not have access to the original data set, they use a part of
Red Pajama's data set as a subset for initial training.

Evaluation Results

It is important to note that Original Llama was trained on 1 trillion tokens,

while Open Llama (in its current form) was trained on 200 billion tokens.
The evaluation results compare Open Llama with GPT-J, a 6 billion
parameter model trained by EleutherAI.
The evaluation results show that while there are some cases where
Open Llama does not perform as well as Original Llama (e.g., certain
benchmark datasets), there are also cases where it outperforms Original
Llama (e.g., Arc Easy dataset).
source- https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama

Smaller Models

They are also training much smaller three billion models in hope for
facilitating large language model usage in low resource cases. With a
3 billion parameter model, you probably will be able to run this on
consumer hardware without the need for expensive GPUs. If that
actually works, there are a lot of different use cases where this model
can be used.

Model Files

The project is on Hugging Face Hub under OpenML research. There

are two different model files.
 EasyLM format.
If using the easyLM platform, you don't need a number or tokenizer
and weights because they have retrained the whole thing from
scratch.

Pytorch format
For using the weights in the Pytorch format with transformers library,
they use BOS (beginning of sentence) token (id=1) during training,
so it is important to prepend this token for best performance during
few-shot evaluation. The rest of the configuration will remain exactly
the same because it's using exactly the same architecture. You don't
really need to change anything at all. you will be just loading different
weights now.

Benefits of Open-Source Language Models

These models are important if you're concerned about data privacy

because you can run them locally.

You can retrain these large language models or fine-tune them on your
very specific business use case, and they will actually outperform much
bigger models because these smaller models would be task specific.

Many companies are progressively trying to get to the open-source

feature of their actual large language models as it's more accessible for
a wide range of people.
The project has been evaluated against original llama models showing
that it can generate high-quality natural language text with similar
performance levels.

Future Plans

Open Llama plans to release more weights and releases of different

usage to get to 30 billion tokens. They are currently focused on
completing the training process of the entire Red Pajama data set for
comparison between original llama and open llama. They plan to train
this model on an entire red pajama data set which is going to be 1.2
trillion tokens. They are also working on smaller models that will optimise
facilitating language model usage in low research or low resource cases.

Conclusion
Open-Llama is an open-source project that offers a complete training
pipeline for building large language models. The Open-Llama project
aims to provide an open reproduction of the Llama model that can be
used commercially. The project plans to release more weights and
releases of different usage to get to 30 billion tokens. They are also
working on smaller models that will optimise facilitating language model
usage in low research or low resource cases. Open-Llama is a promising
project that can help researchers and developers build large language
models with ease.

source
GitHub Repo - https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama
Weights - ttps://huggingface.co/openlm-research/open_llama_7b_preview_200bt

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