What does HackerNews think of RWKV-LM?

RWKV is an RNN with transformer-level LLM performance. It can be directly trained like a GPT (parallelizable). So it's combining the best of RNN and transformer - great performance, fast inference, saves VRAM, fast training, "infinite" ctx_len, and free sentence embedding.

Language: Python

#3 in R
This is what RWKV (https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM) was made for, and what it will be good at.

Wow. Pretty darn cool! <3 :'))))

I've been wondering about this, as simply extending the context window in a straightforward manner would lead to a significant increase in computational resources. I've had the opportunity to experiment with Anthropics' 100k model, and it's evident that they're employing some clever techniques to make it work, albeit with some imperfections. One interesting observation is that their prompt guide recommends placing instructions after the reference text when inputting lengthy text bodies. I noticed that the model often disregarded the instructions if placed beforehand. It's clear that the model doesn't allocate the same level of "attention" to all parts of the input across the entire context window.

Moreover, the inability to cache transformers makes the use of large context windows quite costly, as all previous messages must be sent with each call. In this context, the RWKV-LM project on GitHub (https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM) might offer a solution. They claim to achieve performance comparable to transformers using an RNN, which could potentially handle a 100-page document and cache it, thereby eliminating the need to process the entire document with each subsequent query. However, I suspect RWKV might fall short in handling complex tasks that require maintaining multiple variables in memory, such as mathematical computations, but it should suffice for many scenarios.

On a related note, I believe Anthropics' Claude is somewhat underappreciated. In some instances, it outperforms GPT4, and I'd rank it somewhere between GPT4 and Bard overall.

> The only reason open-source LLMs have a heartbeat is they’re standing on Meta’s weights.

Not necessarily.

RWKV, for example, is a different architecture that wasn't based on Facebook's weights whatsoever. I don't know where BlinkDL (the author) got the training data, but they seem to have done everything mostly independently otherwise.

https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

disclaimer: I've been doing a lot of work lately on an implementation of CPU inference for this model, so I'm obviously somewhat biased since this is the model I have the most experience in.

Would be very interesting to see https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM trained on the same data
I'm waiting for the open assistant dataset, as this model is wicked fast in output and I'd love to see it fine tuned https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM
So maybe RWKV [1] is the next step. It parallelizes even better and seems to have no sequence limit.

[1] https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

RWKV is showing that maybe RNNs can perform on par with transformers

https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

It would be interesting to see a version of RWKV[1] that takes some of the improvements in LLaMA (eg the SwiGLU activation function and the Rotary Embeddings - although I think they have tried rotary embeddings in some versions of RWKV) as well as the same dataset and see how it does.

The dataset is interesting. It's not dissimllar to The Pile, which RWKV is already trained on, but does seem to have quite a lot more preprocessing to increase the dataset quality.

[1] https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM

For those wondering how on earth they are getting decent results from a RNN without long range forgetting, I don't really know either!

But they reference https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.14103 and the bottom section of https://github.com/BlinkDL/RWKV-LM has an explainer.