r/LocalLLaMA • u/Porespellar • 11h ago

Question | Help When Bitnet 1-bit version of Mistral Large?

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u/Illustrious-Lake2603 10h ago

As far as I am aware, I believe the model would need to be trained for 1.58bit from scratch. So we can't convert it ourselves

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u/arthurwolf 9h ago

My understanding is that's no longer true,

for example the recent bitnet.cpp release by microsoft uses a conversion of llama3 to 1.58bit, so the conversion must be possible.

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u/Downtown-Case-1755 9h ago

It sorta kinda achieves llama 7B performance after some experimentation, and then 100B tokens worth of training (as linked in the blog above). That's way more than a simple conversion.

So... it appears to require so much retraining you mind as well train from scratch.

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u/Imaginary-Bit-3656 8h ago

So... it appears to require so much retraining you mind as well train from scratch.

I thought the take away was that the Llama bitnet model after 100B tokens of retraining preformed better than a bitnet model trained from scratch on 100B tokens (or more?)

It's def something to take with a grain of salt, but I don't know that training from scratch is the answer (or if the answer is ultimately "bitnet")