Artificial intelligence chip startup Cerebras Systems on Tuesday said it released open source ChatGPT-like models for the research and business community to use for free in an effort to foster more collaboration.
Silicon Valley-based Cerebras released seven models all
trained on its AI supercomputer called Andromeda, including smaller 111 million
parameter language models to a larger 13 billion parameter model.
"There is a big movement to close what has been open
sourced in AI...it's not surprising as there's now huge money in it," said
Andrew Feldman, founder and CEO of Cerebras. "The excitement in the
community, the progress we've made, has been in large part because it's been so
open."
Models with more parameters are able to perform more complex
generative functions.
OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT launched late last year, for
example, has 175 billion parameters and can produce poetry and research, which
has helped draw large interest and funding to AI more broadly.
Cerebras said the smaller models can be deployed on phones
or smart speakers while the bigger ones run on PCs or servers, although complex
tasks like large passage summarization require larger models.
However, Karl Freund, a chip consultant at Cambrian AI, said
bigger is not always better.
"There's been some interesting papers published that
show that (a smaller model) can be accurate if you train it more," said
Freund. "So there's a trade off between bigger and better trained."
Feldman said his biggest model took a little over a week to
train, work that can typically take several months, thanks to the architecture
of the Cerebras system, which includes a chip the size of a dinner plate built
for AI training.
Most of the AI models today are trained on Nvidia Corp's
chips, but more and more startups like Cerebras are trying to take share in
that market.
The models trained on Cerebras machines can also be used on
Nvidia systems for further training or customization, said Feldman.