Review
This is a linkpost for https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-1-release
This is DiLoCo (Nov 2023 paper), a local SGD setup where the outer optimizer updates much more rarely (every 100-500 steps of the inner optimizers), asking for much less bandwidth (it uses Nesterov momentum in its state). The inner optimizers run within individual clusters, and the outer optimizer aggregates updates from individual clusters, using a much slower network that connects the clusters. The experiments were done with models of up to 400M parameters. (See also this paper on asynchronous variants of DiLoCo.)
The original paper lacks good compute efficiency measurements. The distributed training experiments start from a checkpoint trained for 24K steps, continuing for 64K more steps (to a total of 88K) in various distributed configurations. Even for the non-distributed configuration the perplexity keeps increasing to step 29K (Figure 7b, Figure 9). The compute expended in a non-distributed run between steps 24K and 88K gets expended in an 8-cluster run between steps 24K and 32K, when perplexity barely starts going down from the global maximum. So there is no way of comparing how well an 8-cluster run uses its compute, because the non-distributed experiment stops so early (at 88K steps) that the uninformative poorly optimized early state of the model still dominates the distributed configuration that uses the same amount of compute (at 32K steps).
Prime Intellect first reproduced DiLoCo in Jul 2024 (blog post, paper) on models of up to 1.1B parameters, taking training efficiency measurements. The largest experiment with a 1.1B model runs across 4 nodes that communicate only every 125 steps, and matches perplexity of a similar training run within a single cluster (with communication every step) using 20% more compute (Figure 7, comparing with 4x batch size baseline).
The new 10B model lacks baselines for comparison, so doesn't help with understanding how training efficiency depends on scale, but the results on benchmarks seem similar to those of other models with similar size and number of training tokens (Table 4 in the blog post).
We're excited to release INTELLECT-1, the first 10B parameter language model collaboratively trained across the globe. This represents a 10× scale-up from our previous research and demonstrates that large-scale model training is no longer confined to large corporations but can be achieved through distributed, community-driven approaches. The next step is scaling this even further to frontier model sizes and ultimately open source AGI.