Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Almost Timely News: 🗞️ Small Language Models and Generative AI (2024-09-29)

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Christopher S Penn
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Almost Timely News

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Almost Timely News: 🗞️ Small Language Models and Generative AI (2024-09-29)
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What’s On My Mind: Small Language Models and Generative AI

Small is the new large.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but there’s a logic to that statement. Large language models, like the ones that power tools such as ChatGPT, have historically been gigantic pieces of software that require entire data centers and even nuclear reactors to power. They consume crazy amounts of electricity and fresh water to keep massive clusters of computers operating.

Since the beginning of the generative AI era, there has been parallel development of open models (sometimes called local AI, private AI, open weights models… clearly marketing has not been involved in this naming scheme) that are smaller but still capable of doing many generative AI tasks.

This past week, we saw another entrant in the small models field, Meta’s Llama 3.2 1B and 3B, joining a family of models like Gemma 2 (Google), Phi 3.5 (Microsoft), Qwen 2.5 (Alibaba), and others. These models, all under 5 billion parameters, are small, lightweight, fast, and consume far fewer resources than their massive siblings like GPT-4o, o1, etc.

So let’s break down what this all means, why you might care and want to implement it, and how to decide what to use small language models for.

This week’s newsletter is very technical, so here’s the TLDR.

TLDR:

Smaller AI models are emerging as a more efficient and accessible alternative to the giant, power-hungry ones.

Think of AI models like libraries: bigger models have more books (knowledge), but are also slower and use more resources. Smaller models have less knowledge, but are faster, more private, and can run on your phone or laptop.

Smaller models are good for summarizing text, extracting information, and rewriting content. They are less good at complex tasks or generating creative content without a lot of guidance.

Choosing the right size AI depends on the task: you don’t always need a huge model for simple jobs. Smaller models can be a great option for everyday use, especially if you value privacy and want to save energy.

Part 1: Model Sizes

To get a sense of how to think about language models and their sizes, we should talk about how they’re made. All language models (and their multimodal cousins) are built using massive amounts of data, typically scraped from the Internet and other public and private data sources. Model capabilities are measured in the number of word pieces (tokens) that are used to build them; more is better, but increases the cost of building them. That’s why you see the usual list of suspects like Google, Microsoft, and Meta as the originators of many models – they have the budget, compute capacity, and facilities to build these things.

Meta’s Llama 3 models are trained on 15 trillion tokens; to give you a sense of how much text that is, that’s about 12 trillion words. That’s a bookshelf of text-only books which stretches around the equator twice. It’s a huge amount of text.

Once a big tech company makes a model, they then make various size versions, labeled by the number of parameters. Parameters are the statistical relationships between tokens. There’s a clear statistical relationship between word pieces, observed when the models are made. For example, can you predict the next word in these text sequences?

  • I pledge allegiance to the ____
  • God save the _____

There’s a good chance you can predict these if you’re American or British, or familiar with American and British cultures. The probability is nearly 100% in the first sequence of the next word being “flag”, and a mix of probabilities in the second sequence being “Queen” or “King” depending on the dataset.

The relationship between each of those words is a parameter. When we say a model has 1 billion parameters or 3 billion parameters, we’re talking about the number of statistical associations it knows about.

Here’s a concrete example using hair color. A small model, if you gave it the word blonde, might come up with a few associations:

Small shelf of hair color

A big model, if you gave it the word blonde, might come up with far more associations:

Large shelf of hair color

The bigger the model, the more associations it has for every word you ask it. If these models were libraries, a small model might be a little community library or a tiny library. A big model might be a library like the Boston Public Library or the British Library in London. They have more knowledge to draw on because they have greater numbers of statistical associations.

So don’t we want the biggest number of parameters all the time? No – more parameters means the model has more associations – but is bigger, consumes more resources, and is slower. More memory, more processing power, more electricity, etc. The bigger a model is, the more resources it consumes and the slower it works.

Models under 5 billion parameters can run on modern high-end smartphones. Models under 2 billion parameters can run on most smartphones (albeit not quickly for low-end smartphones) – but a phone consumes far less power than a data center.

Here’s how these two metrics – training data tokens and parameters – interact. The more training tokens that went in, the more robust the model is compared to a similar size model with less training data. That’s why a model like Meta’s Llama is so incredibly smart for its size. Even though it has a small number of parameters, it had a huge training data set, and thus its performance is better.

Going back to our hair color example, if your training data set was a small shelf of products, then your knowledge would be limited to what you saw, and you wouldn’t have the vocabulary to describe exotic hair colors. If your training data set was a manufacturing facility for hair coloring, then you’ve seen every possible combination of hair color, and even if your vocabulary is relatively small, it still has more range of knowledge about hair colors.

Part 2: What Small Models Are and Are Not Good At

Let’s extend our analogy of the model size as a conceptual library. A small model has a small number of books. A large model has a large number of books. Because the small model has less knowledge, it’s less fluent, especially when it comes to generation.

As an aside, the irony is that despite us calling it “generative AI”, generation is what most language and image models are least good at.

There are 6 major use case categories of generative AI – generation, extraction, summarization, rewriting, classification, and question answering.

Here are my three rules for working with models of any size:

  1. The smaller the model, the more likely it is to make things up, all other things being equal.
  2. The smaller the model, the more data you need to bring into the conversation.
  3. The smaller the model, the more granular you need to make the task. Reasoning declines with size.

If you follow these 3 rules, small models can be just as capable as large ones for a wide variety of tasks. Which tasks depends on how much data you’re bringing.

In order, these are the tasks that small language models excel at, from best to worst:

  1. Extraction: it’s super easy for a language model to return an identified portion of data.
  2. Summarization: pretty easy for a language model to boil down existing text.
  3. Rewriting: pretty easy for a language model to rewrite things like writing style and tone as long as you provide solid examples and strong prompts. Small models do suffer issues with things like translation.
  4. Classification: depending on the complexity of the classification, small models may not be able to think things through for complex classification.
  5. Question answering: depending on the complexity of the question, small models may not be able to stitch together complex knowledge.
  6. Generation: absent you providing data, small models will happily hallucinate all kinds of things.

By keeping these guidelines and rules in mind, you’ll be able to decide what tasks you do and don’t want to hand off to small models.

Part 3: Choosing a Model

We’re going to have some more thorough documentation up on the Trust Insights website about this soon, but for now, here’s a good rule of thumb. Every computer has three main resources: CPU power, regular memory (RAM), and video memory (VRAM). For maximum generative AI performance, you need as much VRAM as possible.

For people with M-series Macs, whatever your Mac’s total memory is, divide it by half and that’s how much VRAM you effectively have, give or take.

For people with Windows computers, your computer should be able to tell you how much VRAM you have. If you can play Call of Duty at full resolution with no issues, you probably have a lot.

The rule of thumb is this: whatever your VRAM is, you can run a model that’s 1.5 times that size in billions of parameters.

For example:

  • If you have 4 GB of VRAM, you can run a model up to 6 billion parameters with a good size conversational memory.
  • If you have 16 GB of VRAM, you can run a model up to 24 billion parameters with a good size conversational memory.
  • If you have 64 GB of VRAM, I envy you. You can run a model up to 96 billion parameters with a good size conversational memory.
  • If you have 512 GB of VRAM, you have a server cluster in your house and you probably have an electric bill with many digits before the decimal. But you can run pretty much whatever you want.

There are more complex and arcane rules for selecting a model (things like quantization level, model format, etc.) but those are for another time. The above rule of thumb is generally a safe one.

Now, what kind of small language model might you want? Here’s where it gets tricky: as of yesterday, there are over a million to choose from on Hugging Face, the world’s largest repository of open models.

A million.

Why? Because with open models, people can download a foundational model like Llama 3.2 and customize it to their needs. Some people might customize it to be super good at programming but bad at writing. Other people might make a version that’s great at writing fiction but terrible at writing non-fiction.

Generally speaking, you want to use foundational models to start, models from companies like Meta, Mistral, IBM, Google, etc. Because those models will be as versatile as they can be in a small package.

Part 4: Prompting Small Models

We’re all used to writing great, highly detailed prompts for big models like Google Gemini and GPT-4o, and those complex, multi-step prompts do well in big models. It’s what we teach in our Generative AI for Marketers course and our lectures, workshops, and keynotes.

Those big prompts don’t work nearly as well in small models because they simply do not have the reasoning capabilities of larger models. To accomplish similar tasks, we need to break up our big models prompts into the individual steps they’re composed of, and either manually or programmatically (using code) feed them to our small language models.

For example, suppose you have a multi-page prompt for generating a blog post in your writing style that contains examples, instructions, and a scoring mechanism. A big models like Gemini 1.5 Pro will run that as is. A small models like Gemma 2 will need you to break it into individual pieces – first telling it what the writing style is, then what is a good example and a bad example, then the instructions, then the scoring mechanism. Each piece has to be executed separately and during development should absolutely be inspected by a human to make sure the model is doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

Small models tend to have smaller conversational memories – that is, they can remember fewer things during a conversation session. Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, for example, as a giant models can remember a conversation that’s 1.5 million words long – effectively 2 copies of Shakespeare’s complete works. Meta’s Llama 3.2 can only hold about 80,000 words – the length of a business book – and will run very slowly at that size.

By breaking down prompts into tiny pieces and feeding each piece into the model, we’ll take advantage of what small models are capable up without overwhelming them or confusing them.

Additionally, small models will have less of a vocabulary than larger models, so one of the first tasks you’ll need to do is ask the model to take your existing prompts and rewrite them to work best with it. For those folks who are highly technical, a framework like DSpy can help you automate that (though it’s vast overkill for most tasks).

One way around the shorter conversational memory of small models is to provide them with extra data in a custom database. This is a technique known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) – where you take your data, encoding it in a format that models can read, and then make that database available to the model. If we think of a model like a library, retrieval augmented generation is like building a new wing on the library. The librarian still has the same general tasks, but now has more resources to help answer questions.

Part 5: Okay, But Why Small Models?

With all these tradeoffs, why would we use small models? My MAICON 2024 talk explored all this in detail, but the short version is that small models you run on your hardware are private (no data goes anywhere off your device), low power (good for sustainability), and always available. I’ve used models on my laptop during flights without WiFi and had the power of generative AI ready to help me whenever I need it, especially with a robust setup.

This opens up tremendous doors of access. A person might want access to basic generative AI for summarization, but not using third party services. Maybe you’ve got a doctor’s note you need to have explained, or a document you want summarized that’s confidential. Local AI, open model AI, allows you to do this on your own hardware with no Internet access at all.

For places with fewer resources like developing regions, this makes generative AI available at no cost besides powering your phone. It levels the playing field even more, especially for people who maybe can’t afford the 20-30/month for paid online services, but still would like to enjoy data privacy.

The reality is that for many AI tasks – like “write this email in a way that won’t get me fired” – we don’t need big foundational models that chew up huge amounts of natural resources and energy. It’s like taking a Harrier to the grocery store when a bicycle will do perfectly fine.

If we want generative AI to not only live up to the hype, but not cause more harm than good, we need to begin looking at how to choose the right size AI for the task at hand. We’ll save a lot of energy that way, enhance privacy, and still get the jobs done we want AI to do.

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Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, I receive direct financial compensation for promoting them.

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See you next week,

Christopher S. Penn

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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.

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