this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
307 points (98.4% liked)

Linux

48074 readers
707 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Please create a comment or react with an emoji there.

(IMO, they should've limited comments,and gone with reaction count there, its looks mess right now )

all 30 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] sir_reginald 116 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

As long as this allows running local, free software models I don't see the drawback of including this.

My main issue with ChatGPT and similar products is that they use my data to train their models. Running a model locally (like Llama) solves this problem, but running LLMs require extremely powerful GPUs, specially the bigger ones like Llama 70b.

So dedicated hardware for this is a nice thing for those that want it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It requires powerful gpus yes but not always. It depends a lot on how fast you want it to run. Microsoft and openai need powerful ai gpus because they have a lot of requests, data and want it to go fast. The dataset may also require to be stored in memory or gpu memory for fast access and use by the ai.

For Llama, it has been released as open source. And what is amazing about open source, is the community. A Llama entirely in c++ has been created https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp .

And someone even managed to make it run, fast enough, on a phone with 8gb of available ram https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/750 . Tho with a smaller dataset.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, if it's a native Linux port. If it requires WINE, forget it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think wine can interact with low level hardware

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can someone quickly explain what this is about?

[–] fhein 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is the first time I'm hearing about this, but this is how they describe it on their product page:

The AI-Powered Future of Windows Devices

Build, explore, and immerse yourself on select laptops with Ryzen™ AI built in. With dedicated AI accelerator hardware seamlessly integrated on-chip and software that intelligently optimizes tasks and workloads, CPU and GPU resources are freed up to enable optimal performance.

But based on the examples they have on github, it sounds like it might be useful to run generic AI compute stuff. I haven't seen any details about what memory it uses, since especially LLMs require large amounts of fast memory. If it can use all the system RAM it might provide medium-fast inference of decent models, similar to M1/M2 Macs. If it has dedicated RAM it'll probably be even faster but possibly extremely limited in what you can do with it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

if it can use all the system RAM it might provide medium-fast inference of decent models

Yeah, I get what you mean -- if I can throw 128GB or 256GB of system memory and parallel compute hardware together, that'd enable use of large models, which would let you do some things that can't currently be done other than (a) slowly, on a CPU or (b) with far-more-expensive GPU or GPU-like hardware. Like, you could run a huge model with parallel compute hardware in a middle ground for performance that doesn't exist today.

It doesn't really sound to me like that's the goal, though.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-demoes-ryzen-ai-at-computex-2023

AMD Demoes Ryzen AI at Computex 2023

AI for the masses.

The goal for the XDNA AI engine is to execute lower-intensity AI inference workloads, like audio, photo, and video processing, at lower power than you could achieve on a CPU or GPU while delivering faster response times than online services, thus boosting performance and saving battery power.

Much of the advantage of having an inbuilt AI engine resides in power efficiency, a must in power-constrained devices like laptops, but that might not be as meaningful in an unconstrained desktop PC that can use a more powerful dedicated GPU or CPU for inference workloads -- but without the battery life concerns.

I asked McAfee if those factors could impact AMD's decision on whether or not it would bring XDNA to desktop PCs, and he responded that it will boil down to whether or not the feature delivers enough value that it would make sense to dedicate valuable die area to the engine. AMD is still evaluating the impact, particularly as Ryzen 7040 works its way into the market.

That sounds like the goal is providing low-power parallel compute capability. I'm guessing stuff like local speech recognition on laptops would be a useful local, low-power application that could take advantage of parallel compute.

The demo has it doing facial recognition, though I don't really know where there's a lot of demand for doing that with limited power use today.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Facial recognition could be used for better face unlock login features as well as "identifying" people in photos - not necessarily names but saying "these 400 photos of the 10000 given have the same person". And without reliance on any external services.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah, but do either of those match the aims?

If you have a face unlock, you only rarely need to run it. It's not like you're constantly doing face recognition on a stream of video. You don't have the power-consumption problem.

If you have an archive of 10000 photos, you probably don't need to do the computation on battery power, and you probably don't mind using a GPU to do it.

I mean, I can definitely imagine systems that constantly run facial recognition, like security cameras set up to surveil and identify large crowds of people in public areas, but:

  • I suspect that most of them want access to a big database of face data. I don't know how many cases you have a disconnected system with a large database of face data.

  • I doubt that most of those need to be running on a battery.

The reason I mention speech recognition is because I can legitimately see a laptop user wanting to constantly be processing an incoming audio stream, like to take in voice commands (the "Alexa" model, but not wanting to send recorded snippets elsewhere).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Probably overkill for facial unlock (though it might make it more accurate), but for just facial recognition/processing there are still plenty of use cases, including:

  • Security systems: Imagine it doesn't just recognize faces but being able to go "analyse the face in this time frame and correlate it to anyone in the last two weeks" to determine that the guy who robbed you is actually the same dude who delivered a package or was supposedly doing door-to-door sales a week ago

  • Home automation systems, with per resident configurations. Maybe it's not unlocking your computer but rather your house via a good camera and ZigBee lock.

  • Better face mapping: This could be for substituting on faces (deep-fake'ish stuff) but also see-aging, better real-time mapping facial expressions to an online avatars etc

And going beyond faces:

AI mapping could greatly improve stuff like generating 3D models from photogrammetry. Take a video walk around of your room, car, or shed and let AI assist on building the model

VR currently relies on either bouncing fast-moving invisible beams of light off sensors on a headset/controllers, or recognitions of controllers/hands from optics on a headset. These tend to suffer from a lack of identification on other extremities such as legs (hence Facebook's legless avatars) Kinect worked by identifying humanoid objects with visible light+IR and mapping out a body including leg movement etc, but suffered from lag on fast movement. An AI could probably sort that out faster, reducing lag for smoother full-body movement via camera, and leave the headset to just be a visor or high-res viewing device, maybe with a small eye-tracking camera.

All of these could be done local-only, without needing cloud or LLM's, enough improves security+privacy and removes dependence on somebody else's system in the cloud (which may not exist or cost the same in the future)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I can imagine that there would be people who do want cheap, low-power parallel compute, but speaking for myself, I've got no particular use for that today. Personally, if they have available resources for Linux, I'd rather that they go towards improving support for beefier systems like their GPUs, doing parallel compute on Radeons. That's definitely an area that I've seen people complain about being under-resourced on the dev side.

I have no idea if it makes business sense for them, but if they can do something like a 80GB GPU (well, compute accelerator, whatever) that costs a lot less than $43k, that'd probably do more to enable the kind of thing that @[email protected] is talking about.

[–] CeeBee 2 points 1 year ago

The demo has it doing facial recognition

The demo is just face detection and not recognition. But usually if something can run one, then it can run the other.

[–] bouh 1 points 1 year ago

IMO they'd be idiot not to go hard on this. More efficiency on the computing needed for AI can quickly scale to a'y application that will be developed in the future.

We are going in a future of limited resources and expensive energy. That's a short term problem.

[–] AlmightySnoo 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's also mentioned here that it's based on Xilinx IP, so it's very likely some sort of FPGA to accelerate matrix multiplications and convolutions usually found in neural networks (likely similar to Tensor/Matrix cores found in Nvidia Turing (or later) GPUs and AMD's recent Instinct GPUs, or Google's "Edge TPU" that is included in the Tensor chips of recent Pixel phones). So it's unlikely it has any dedicated memory.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

AI in the terms of Computer Science, of course.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Love the comment that is like second down with a link to some 5 hour live stream. I skipped to a random spot in it and the guy had the unabomber manifesto up, and said it "detailed the greatest problem in society today". What a fucking drop for a github comment, 10/10 no notes.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's hilarious how you managed to land in the Unabomber segment in a 5h30m video. The funny coincidences of life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you know the person they were posting? I just assume anyone that does 5hr YouTube videos is unhinged, and having it linked from someone randomly on GitHub didn't help my view of their followers. Finding the Unabomber confirmed it enough for me lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have wikipedia surface level knowledge about him. It's george hots. The guy that got sued by Sony for jailbreaking the playstation something; also jailbreaked the iphone; founded comma.ai which develops software (openpilot) and sells hardware for making a car into a "self driving" one (more like assistive driving). He was/is a bit of a celebrity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Anyone who does 5 hour videos is unhinged

Quinton Reviews has left the chat

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that hit the GPU performance? I'm ok with it as long as it doesn't become a personal data farming tool.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do want it to be a personal data farming tool, as lomg as I'm the only consumer of the data.

A personal assistant is only as good as it knows you. In an ideal world, your AI will be customized to you, but only for your use.

I think this sort of processing addition would empower running ML locally; having to send dara out for processing on (other people's) servers is one of the biggest obsticals to adoption by privacy-minded folk.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

See that's the issue I can see with it. Sure it does local processing for my own stuff, but I'd be miffed if they're uploading everything to their servers, effectively using my system resources to build out their AI capabilities. Granted, this would be how they make their money (if something is free then you're the product), so it's kind of a tricky balance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I dont think they need to know. If they want a chance in this weird AI-capitalist explosion, they will use Linux.