Big vs. small GPU clouds for fine-tuning LLMs
Hi everyone,
I am looking to fine-tune a Llama 2 (the 7B and 70B to see if there is a big difference), and I am looking at the different Cloud options for GPUs.
There are of course the big cloud providers like AWS, and the smaller ones like Paperspace and co.
I am trying to benchmark each in terms of price, ease of use, quick availability of GPUs, and feature-richness.
Could you share the insights on big vs small cloud providers when training a LLM? If you have other criteria to make a decision I would be interested too!
(
16 comments
| 2 points
| on HN
)
also this: https://vast.ai/
maybe also vultr
And QLora makes 70B training relatively affordable.
But as a random aside, consider starting with an existing finetune instead of base llama 70B, and match the formatting in your dataset.
I really wish there was (maybe there is?) a 7 or 13B (or 70B) version with extended context (at least 16k) and function calling support ala OpenAI.
Both exist on their own, I don't know of a combination.
0 - https://cloud.vast.ai/?ref_id=74601
When you cannot get any improvements over several days/weeks of different experiments and have converged somewhat, then move up to the next model size, and do that to convergence. Then repeat this loop as you go.
Same concept as mipmapping, just with resources. How you use your resources is more important than the ones you have. I've made the vast majority of my own big discoveries with a T4 or a single A100, generally speaking, and I've done this for years.
In terms of providers, I like Lambda the best, personally, but I do a shocking amount of work in Colab Pro due to its iterative nature. I believe I've had GPU availability issues for both of them, however.
I made a training speedrunning repository that sort of assumes anyone can grab an A100 on Colab, but I guess that's not true as much now. Which honestly is a bit of a surprise for me! DDDD::::
I would say not production ready.
You might also consider Lambda Labs. Or GCP.
Edit: And I realize you emailed me the other day - hi again!
See also - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
We allow you to change all the hyper parameters such as num_epochs, learning_rate, tokenizer etc and even can submit your own prompt templates. If you want to use the recommended settings you can. It allows you to focus on your data and your hyperparameters rather than worrying about setup and infrastructure.
If you want to write your own code to train, you can do that also - the interface is as if you were developming locally:)