Phi 2.0

Microsoft's small but powerful transformer model

Phi-2.0, a large language model by Microsoft, can be used effectively for small, lightweight use cases in LLM applications, and these models can cooperate to create applications for business and consumers.

Phi-2.0 Overview

• Improved Version: Phi-2.0 is an advancement over Phi-1.5, with doubled parameters (2.7 billion) and extended training data, making it outperform its predecessor and other larger models on several benchmarks.

• Architecture: It's a Transformer-based causal model, using a mix of synthetic data created with GPT-3.5 and filtered web data for training.

• Training: The model underwent training with 1.4 trillion tokens over 14 days using 96 A100 GPUs, displaying improved behavior in areas like toxicity and bias.

Utilisation in Lightweight Applications

• Hardware Requirements: Phi-2.0 is suitable for smaller setups, requiring at least 5.4 GB of GPU VRAM for fp16 parameters, and can be optimized to run on GPUs with lower VRAM by quantizing to 4-bit.

• Fine-Tuning: The model is easier and cheaper to fine-tune than its predecessors.

Cooperative Application Development

• Fine-tuning for Instructions: Phi-2.0 can be further enhanced by fine-tuning it on instruction datasets, making it more effective in following instructions.

• Application in Business and Consumer Products: By leveraging its ability to be fine-tuned on smaller hardware and its improved handling of instructions, Phi-2.0 can be integrated into various business and consumer applications. These might include real-time data processing, automated customer service, language translation, content generation, and more.

Technical Implementation

• Inference Performance: The model shows robust inference performance with different configurations, including fp16 and 4-bit quantized versions.

• Memory and Speed: The quantized version of the model consumes less VRAM but at a slightly reduced inference speed. Adjustments like flash_attn, flash_rotary, and fused_dense can further optimize performance, especially on recent GPUs.

Conclusion

Phi-2.0's smaller size, coupled with its ability to be fine-tuned on less powerful hardware, makes it an attractive option for developing lightweight LLM applications. Its efficiency in handling instructions and real-time data can be particularly beneficial in creating cooperative applications for both business and consumer use.