[HN Gopher] Bumblebee: GPT2, Stable Diffusion, and More in Elixir
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       Bumblebee: GPT2, Stable Diffusion, and More in Elixir
        
       Author : clessg
       Score  : 171 points
       Date   : 2022-12-08 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.livebook.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.livebook.dev)
        
       | JediLuke wrote:
       | This is really amazing, and will make wiring up some of these
       | models together much easier I think. Elixir is making great
       | strides in being a fantastic choice for ML
        
         | tylrbrkr wrote:
         | For sure. The pace at which they've been making all these
         | improvement is really impressive.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | sam5q wrote:
       | Huge step for ML in Elixir! Looking forward to using this and
       | seeing what others do as well.
        
       | josevalim wrote:
       | Hi everyone, glad to be back here with the official announcement!
       | 
       | It is late here but feel free to drop questions and I will answer
       | them when I am up. Meanwhile I hope you will enjoy the content we
       | put out: the announcements, example apps, and sample notebooks!
        
         | tommica wrote:
         | Its really interesting- need to play with this!
        
         | pbowyer wrote:
         | Congratulations on this release!
         | 
         | If I have a Huggingface model that I've finetuned, can I load
         | it using Bumblebee? I fine-tuned ConvNext and changed it into a
         | multi-label classifier and saved it as a PyTorch model. It
         | works great but being able to use it in LiveBook instead of
         | Jupyter Notebook would be fantastic.
         | 
         | I think I'd have to convert the format, but what then?
        
           | seanmor5 wrote:
           | No need to convert the format! Bumblebee supports loading
           | parameters directly from PyTorch. You can just specify
           | `{:local, path/to/checkpoint}` in `Bumblebee.load_model`
        
         | chem83 wrote:
         | Congrats on the launch! Muito legal!
         | 
         | Alternatively to EXLA/Torchx, any thoughts on supporting an ML
         | compiler frontend like Google IREE/MLIR by generating StableHLO
         | or LinAlg? This could pave the way towards supporting multiple
         | hardware targets (Vulkan-based, RVV-based, SME-based etc.) with
         | minimal effort from the framework.
        
           | josevalim wrote:
           | Yes, we have been eyeing IREE but no work has started yet.
           | However, our compiler architecture was designed exactly to
           | make this possible, so it will be definitely welcome if
           | someone decides to trail ahead on this road!
        
           | seanmor5 wrote:
           | There is a project in the ecosystem that builds on top of
           | MLIR and can target any MLIR dialect, but it is not mature
           | enough yet.
           | 
           | I think it would be great to see!
        
         | losvedir wrote:
         | What's the motivation for the name? I get "numbat" to
         | "numerical", but not immediately seeing any connection for
         | bumblebee.
         | 
         | Maybe a more serious question: is anyone using Elixir ML in
         | production? I'm absolutely gobsmacked at the quantity and
         | quality of development effort that's gone into it (and use
         | Livebook daily, though not for ML stuff). It's clearly a major
         | focus for the team. I'm wondering if it's ready for production
         | adoption, and if so, if anyone has used it "in anger" yet.
        
           | seanmor5 wrote:
           | We are all really into bumblebees, specifically the kind that
           | can transform into 1977 Yellow Camaros
        
           | cigrainger wrote:
           | We use it in production at Amplified! It's been a joy. We
           | train our own large language models and have fine tuned and
           | deployed using Elixir. I talked about it at ElixirConf this
           | year (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Nr4dNu6hI).
           | 
           | We were able to completely eliminate a few python services
           | and consolidate to all Elixir for ETL and ML.
        
           | afhammad wrote:
           | > Maybe a more serious question: is anyone using Elixir ML in
           | production?
           | 
           | Checkout this recent talk about how https://www.amplified.ai/
           | moved from Python to an Elixir ML stack:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Nr4dNu6hI
        
         | AlphaWeaver wrote:
         | Congrats on the launch! Been eagerly sitting in the #elixir IRC
         | channel all day :)
         | 
         | How easy would it be to support OpenAI's new Whisper
         | transcription model in Bumblebee?
        
           | seanmor5 wrote:
           | It should not be too hard! From what I saw Whisper is similar
           | to Bart, and we have Bart. The missing piece is a library for
           | audio processing to tensors.
        
             | tylrbrkr wrote:
             | Would Nx Signal be that missing piece?
             | https://github.com/polvalente/nx-signal
        
               | seanmor5 wrote:
               | For some of it! I was thinking more something for loading
               | different audio encodings to Nx tensors...so doing
               | everything up until Nx
        
       | thedangler wrote:
       | Excited to play around with this.
        
       | pawelduda wrote:
       | Awesome release, I might want to try this in my Phoenix project.
       | Are there any major disadvantages to doing this vs bringing
       | Python ecosystem into the mix, aside from obviously, missing out
       | on tooling?
        
         | josevalim wrote:
         | I think perhaps the bigger issue is that you will be trailing
         | ahead a new path which means fewer resources if you get stuck.
         | BUT you can join the #machine-learning channel of the Erlang
         | Ecosystem Foundation or ask around in the Elixir Forum!
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-08 23:00 UTC)