Episode Details

Hey everyone, this is Alex Volkov, the host of ThursdAI, welcome to yet another recap of yet another incredibly fast past faced week.

I want to start with a ThursdAI update, we now have a new website http://thursdai.news and a new dedicated twitter account @thursdai_pod as we build up the ThursdAI community and brand a bit more.

As always, a reminder that ThursdAI is a weekly X space, newsletter and 2! podcasts, short form (Apple, Spotify) and the unedited long-form spaces recordings (RSS, Zealous page) for those who’d like the nitty gritty details (and are on a long drive somewhere).

Open Source LLMs & Finetuning

Honestly, the speed with which LLaMa 2 finetunes are taking over state of the art performance is staggering. We literally talk about a new model every week that’s topping the LLM Benchmark leaderboard, and it hasn’t even been a month since LLaMa 2 release day 🤯 (July 18 for those who are counting)

Enter Platypus 70B (🔗)

Platypus 70B-instruct is currently the highest ranked open source LLM and other Platypus versions

We’ve had the great pleasure to chat with new friends of the pod Arielle Lee and Cole Hunter (and long time friend of the pod Nataniel Ruiz, co-author of DreamBooth, and StyleDrop which we’ve covered before) about this incredible effort to finetune LLaMa 2, the open dataset they curated and released as part of this effort and how quick and easy it is possible to train (a smaller 13B) version of Platypus (just 5 hours on a single A100 GPU ~= 6$ on Lambda 🤯)

We had a great interview with Garage BAIND the authors of Platypus and we’ll be posting that on a special Sunday episode of ThursdAI so make sure you are subscribed to receive that when it drops.

Open Orca + Platypus = OrctyPus 13B? (🔗)

We’ve told you about OpenOrca just last week, from our friends at @alignment_lab and not only is Platypus is the best performing 70B model, the open source community comes through with an incredible merge and collaborating to bring you the best 13B model, which is a merge between OpenOrca and Platypus.

This 13B model is now very close to the original LLaMa 70B in many of the metrics. LESS THAN A MONTH after the initial open source. It’s quite a remarkable achievement and we salute the whole community for this immense effort 👏 Also, accelerate! 🔥

Join the skunksworks

Speaking of fast moving things, In addition to the above interview, we had a great conversation with folks from so called SkunksWorks OS discord, Namely

Listen Now