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Comment on Microsoft researchers developed a hyper-efficient AI model that can run on CPUs

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Repo with demo video and benchmark:

https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet

"...It matches the full-precision (i.e., FP16 or BF16) Transformer LLM with the same model size and training tokens in terms of both perplexity and end-task performance, while being significantly more cost-effective in terms of latency, memory, throughput, and energy consumption..."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17764

That essay on the water cycle makes no sense. Some sentences are repeated three times. The conclusion about the water cycle and energy appears wrong. And what paper is "Jenkins (2010)"?

Am I missing something, or is this regressing to GPT-1 level?

They should probably redo the demo with their latest model. I tried the same prompt on https://bitnet-demo.azurewebsites.net/ and it looked significantly more coherent. At least it didn't get stuck in a loop.

2B parameters should be in the ballpark of GPT-2, no?

  > "...It matches the full-precision (i.e., FP16 or BF16)
Wait... WHAT?!

When did //HALF PRECISION// become //FULL PRECISION//?

FWIW, I cannot find where you're quoting from. I cannot find "matches" on TFA nor the GitHub link. And in the paper I see

  3.2 Inference Accuracy
  
  The bitnet.cpp framework enables lossless inference for ternary BitNet b1.58 LLMs. To evaluate inference accuracy, we randomly selected 1,000 prompts from WildChat [ ZRH+24 ] and compared the outputs generated by bitnet.cpp and llama.cpp to those produced by an FP32 kernel. The evaluation was conducted on a token-by-token basis, with a maximum of 100 tokens per model output, considering an inference sample lossless only if it exactly matched the full-precision output.
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