FSDP+QLoRA: the Answer to 70b-scale AI for desktop class GPUs
Jeremy Howard and collaborators released a new tool combining FSDP, QLoRA, and HQQ to enable training 70b-parameter models on affordable consumer GPUs like RTX 4090s with only 24GB RAM, overcoming traditional memory constraints that required expensive data center GPUs costing over $150k. The approach shards quantized models across multiple GPUs and uses techniques like gradient checkpointing and CPU offloading to achieve efficient training on desktop-class hardware. The blogpost details challenges and solutions integrating these methods, highlighting a significant cost reduction from $150k to under $2.5k for training large language models. Additionally, Twitter recaps mention Inflection AI's Inflection-2.5 model rivaling GPT-4 in benchmarks with less compute, and Grok improving speed by 3x. Yann LeCun discusses multi-step reasoning training for LLMs.