Machine Learning - Mixtral of Experts

Alright learning crew, Ernis here, ready to dive into another fascinating paper! Today, we're talking about Mixtral 8x7B. Now, that might sound like some kind of alien robot, but trust me, it's way cooler than that. It's a new language model, like the ones that power chatbots and help write code. And get this – it's giving the big players like Llama 2 and even GPT-3.5 a serious run for their money!

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So, what makes Mixtral so special? Well, it uses something called a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) architecture. Think of it like this: imagine you have a team of eight super-specialized experts in different fields – maybe one's a math whiz, another's a coding guru, and another is fluent in multiple languages. Instead of having one generalist try to handle everything, Mixtral intelligently picks the two best experts for each specific task.

This is different from models like Mistral 7B, where every piece of information gets processed by every part of the model. With Mixtral, each piece of information only goes to the two most relevant 'experts'.

Even though Mixtral appears to have access to a whopping 47 billion parameters (that's like having all those experts' combined knowledge!), it only actively uses 13 billion parameters for any given task. This is incredibly efficient! It's like having a super-powered brain that only lights up the parts it needs for the job at hand.

"Each token has access to 47B parameters, but only uses 13B active parameters during inference."

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Now, let's talk about performance. Mixtral was trained to understand and generate text based on a massive amount of data – specifically, chunks of text up to 32,000 words long! And the results are impressive. It either beats or matches Llama 2 70B (another powerful language model) and GPT-3.5 across a wide range of tests.

But here's where it really shines: Mixtral absolutely crushes Llama 2 70B when it comes to math problems, generating code, and understanding multiple languages. That's a huge deal for developers, researchers, and anyone who needs a language model that can handle complex tasks with accuracy and speed.

And the best part? There's also a version called Mixtral 8x7B - Instruct, which has been fine-tuned to follow instructions even better. It's so good, it outperforms GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude-2.1, Gemini Pro, and even Llama 2 70B - chat model on benchmarks that measure human preferences.

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Why should you care about all this? Well:

• For developers: Mixtral offers a powerful and efficient alternative to existing language models, potentially leading to faster and more accurate AI applications.
• For researchers: The SMoE architecture opens up new avenues for exploring how to build more intelligent and scalable AI systems.
• For everyone else: Ultimately, better language models mean better chatbots, more helpful virtual assistants, and more accessible AI tools for all.

And the cherry on top? Both the original Mixtral and the Instruct version are released under the Apache 2.0 license, which means they're free to use and modify!

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So, what do you think, learning crew? Here are a couple of things I'm pondering:

• Given that Mixtral uses fewer active parameters than its competitors, does this mean it's also more energy-efficient?
• Could the "expert" approach of Mixtral be applied to other areas of AI, like image recognition or robotics?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments! I'm excited to hear what you think about Mixtral and its potential impact on the future of AI.

Credit to Paper authors: Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Antoine Roux, Arthur Mensch, Blanche Savary, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Emma Bou Hanna, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Bour, Guillaume Lample, Lélio Renard Lavaud, Lucile Saulnier, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Pierre Stock, Sandeep Subramanian, Sophia Yang, Szymon Antoniak, Teven Le Scao, Théophile Gervet, Thibaut Lavril, Thomas Wang, Timothée Lacroix, William El Sayed