Top LLM tools: 2024 edition

Large language models (LLMs) have opened new doors for the natural language processing (NLP) landscape. The LLM market has seen phenomenal growth and innovation.

From large companies to innovative startups, these LLMs represent examples of innovation and excellence in Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this blog, we’ll understand the fundamentals of LLMs and explore some large language models that are reshaping the tech industry.

What is a large language model (LLM)?

LLM is an artificial intelligence algorithm based on deep learning principles that can be trained to process textual content. LLMs are extensively trained on diverse text corpora and can be fine-tuned for specific tasks. With the help of LLM, we can create interesting content, such as essays, code snippets, scripts, music lyrics, e-mails, and so on. The advent of Large language models (LLMs) represents a major significance in the field of artificial intelligence.

How does LLM work?

Large language models work on the principles of deep learning and utilize transformer architecture. Here's how they generally work:

Pre-training: Large language models are initially trained on extensive textual data to understand natural language structure.

Transformer architecture: A transformer architecture with self-attention mechanisms processes input data.

Tokenization: Text is segmented into tokens and represented as vectors in a high-dimensional space.

Layer stacking: Multiple layers of transformer blocks are stacked to capture both position and contextual representations of the text.

Training objective: During pre-training, models predict the next word sequentially, encouraging meaningful representation learning.

Fine-tuning: Models are fine-tuned on specific tasks to improve performance for downstream applications.

Inference: Once trained, models process input text and generate predictions or responses based on learned representations.

Scalability: Large models contain hundreds of billions of parameters, allowing them to capture very complex language structures.

Top LLMs worth exploring:

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving, with new models being developed and released regularly. Here are some of the latest LLM tools available in 2023 and 2024:

Meta’s Llama 2:

Llama 2 is an open-source large language model (LLM) that has gained attention for its advanced capabilities, From 7 to 70 billion parameters and tuning through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), it has made quite a stir in the market. Llama 2 is part of a new generation of LLMs that are free to use and can be used commercially or fine-tuned on your data to develop specialized versions.

Llama 2 is known for its ease of use, and you can run it locally on your machine without installing Python or any programs. This creates a powerful yet accessible chatbot experience customized to your needs. By running Llama 2 locally, you have complete control over your data and conversations and can chat with your bot as you like and even tweak it to improve responses.

There are several ways to run Llama 2 locally. One approach is to use the Llama.cpp tool, which is a port of Llama in C/C++. Llama.cpp makes it possible to run Llama 2 locally using 4-bit integer quantization on Macs, and it also has support for Linux/Windows. Another tool is Ollama, which already has support for Llama 2. You can use the Ollama CLI to download the Llama 2 model without registering for an account or joining any waiting lists.

Hugging face's bloom:

Bloom LLM is an open-source model that can be used commercially or fine-tuned on your data to develop specialized versions. It is part of a new generation of LLMs that are free to use and can be used locally on your device. By running Bloom LLM locally, you have full control over your data and conversations, and you can chat with your bot as much as you want and even tweak it to improve responses.

To use Bloom LLM locally, you can use Hugging Face's ecosystem to deploy the model and use it further. You need to have transformers and accelerate installed. The model can be downloaded from the Hugging Face model hub. Bloom LLM is now available for everyone to use and study. You can get started by downloading, running, and studying Bloom LLM. The Hugging Face team is excited to see what innovators come up with the aid of Bloom LLM.

Cohere:

Cohere LLM is a powerful natural language processing tool that can be used to build a wide range of machine learning-powered applications. It can be used for chatbots, content creation, translation, summarization, question answering, and more. Cohere LLM can be used locally by deploying the model on your server or using the Cohere API.

To use Cohere LLM locally, you can use the Cohere API or deploy the model on your server. Cohere also offers sophisticated customization tools and capabilities with superior performance and scalability. The models are packaged with inference engines that deliver better runtime performance and are accessible through a SaaS API, cloud services, and private deployments.

OpenAI's generative pre-trained transformer (GPT):

GPT-4 is based on OpenAI's GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models transformer-based LLMs. These models are trained on vast amounts of text data and can generate human-like responses to given prompts. GPT-4 uses a variant of the GPT model that is specifically fine-tuned for conversational tasks, making it well-suited for chatbot applications, language translation, and answering queries.

To use ChatGPT on a local machine, follow the steps outlined in the "How to Run ChatGPT Locally on a PC in 5 Easy Steps" guide. The prerequisites for local installation include having Python 3.7 or later installed on your desktop, installing the OpenAI API client, and obtaining an OpenAI API key. Once these prerequisites are met, you can run ChatGPT on your local machine, which provides more control and the ability to customize its responses, fine-tune it with your data, or even tweak the source code to fit your needs better.

Falcon:

Falcon is an open-source large language model (LLM) developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi. It is a decoder-only autoregressive model with 40 billion parameters, trained on an extensive corpus of one trillion tokens. Falcon is designed to excel in various natural language processing tasks, including text generation, summarization, and translation.

Falcon has gained attention for its impressive performance on OpenLLM Leaderboards, surpassing other models such as META's LLaMA-65B. In addition to its impressive performance, Falcon is also open-source, making it accessible to developers and researchers who want to explore its capabilities and contribute to its development. Falcon is available on GitHub, where developers can access the code and documentation to get started with the model.

Google’s PaLM 2:

PaLM 2, Google's next-generation large language model, has been built and evaluated through several key factors. These include using compute-optimal scaling to make the model smaller, more efficient, and with better performance, an improved dataset mixture encompassing a more multilingual and diverse pre-training mixture, and an updated model architecture and objective.

These advancements have enabled PaLM 2 to excel at advanced reasoning, translation, and code generation tasks, making it a powerful and versatile language model.PaLM 2 has been trained on various tasks, allowing it to learn different aspects of language and enhance its language understanding and generation skills. It has been optimized for accuracy, latency, and cost-effectiveness, making it a significant advancement in the field of large language models.

Conclusion

Large language models (LLMs) are really fascinating technology. From big players like Meta's Llama 2 to newer ones like Hugging Face's BLOOM and Cohere, they're offering some pretty cool stuff for developers and researchers like us. These models work cleverly, using techniques like pre-training and fine-tuning to understand and generate human-like text. As we keep exploring and experimenting with them, we're really driving forward the future of AI and how we communicate with technology.