this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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Read the pitch here: https://github.com/ridgerchu/matmulfreellm
Basically, using ternary weights, all inference-time matrix multiplication can be replaced with much simpler matrix addition. This is theoretically more efficient on GPUs, and astronomically more efficient on dedicated hardware (as adders take up a fraction of the space as multipliers in silicon). This would be particularly fantastic for, say, local inference on smartphones or laptop ASICs.
The catch is no one has (publicly) risked a couple of million dollars to test it with a large model, as (so far) training it isn't more efficient than "regular" LLMs.
No one really knows, because they're so closed and opaque!
But it appears that their models perform relatively poorly for thier "size." Qwen is nearly matching GPT-4 in some metrics, yet is probably an order of magnitude smaller, while Google/Claude and some Chinese models are also pulling ahead.