The Top Open-Source Language Models to Watch Out for in 2024
In the rapidly evolving field of open-source AI, 2023 has been a year of significant advancements. While OpenAI's ChatGPT made headlines in 2022, this year has seen the emergence of several high-performance open-source large language models (LLMs) for research and commercial use. Although these models are not yet on par with proprietary AI models like GPT4, they offer a viable alternative to LLMs like GPT 3.5. In this article, we will explore six of the top LLMs to keep an eye on in 2024 as the open-source AI ecosystem continues to evolve.
1. Llama 2: The Best Open-Source LLM Overall
Meta's Llama 2 is one of the most significant open-source LLMs to launch this year. It stands out for its versatility and performance, making it an excellent choice for commercial use. Trained on 2 trillion tokens, Llama 2 supports between 7 to 70 billion parameters, surpassing its predecessor Llama 1 in both data size and context length. It has achieved high rankings in key benchmarks, including reasoning, coding, proficiency, and knowledge tests. Additionally, Llama 2 has demonstrated comparable accuracy to GPT-4 at a significantly lower cost.
2. Falcon 180B: The Most Powerful Open Access Model
Falcon 180B, developed by the United Arab Emirates Technology Innovation Institute (TII), is one of the largest open LLMs to launch in 2023. Trained on 3.5 trillion tokens from the RefinedWeb dataset, Falcon 180B supports up to 180 billion parameters. It excels in natural language tasks and has achieved top rankings on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. However, its underlying license imposes restrictions on commercial use, and it lacks content moderation, making it susceptible to misuse.
3. Code Llama: The Best Open LLM for Code Generation
Meta's Code Llama is an exciting release for developers. It is an AI model trained on code-specific datasets, enabling it to generate code and explain its functionality in various programming languages. Code Llama supports different parameter sizes and has been fine-tuned to streamline workflows and enhance code comprehension. While it offers natural language and code generation capabilities, its coding performance lags behind GPT-4 without additional fine-tuning.
4. Mistral: The Best 7B Pretrained Model
Mistral 7B, developed by Mistral AI, is a small but high-performance open-source LLM with 7 billion parameters. It outperforms larger closed-source models in terms of efficiency, making it suitable for real-time applications. Mistral 7B utilizes techniques like grouped-query attention and sliding window attention to process and generate large texts faster and at a lower cost. It has achieved impressive scores in benchmark tests, making it a viable choice for natural language and code generation tasks.
5. Vicuna: The Best Size-Output Quality LLM
Vicuna 13B, released by UC Berkeley's LMSYS Org, is a fine-tuned AI model based on Meta's Llama. Trained on 70,000 ChatGPT conversations, Vicuna exhibits sophisticated responses comparable to ChatGPT. It achieves high-quality outputs while outperforming other LLMs in various scenarios. However, it has limitations in tasks involving reasoning and mathematics, and its content moderation controls are limited.
6. Giraffe: The Best Scale-Context Length Model
Abacus.AI's Giraffe is a family of fine-tuned AI models based on Llama 2. It extends the model's context length from 4,096 to 32,000, enabling better performance in downstream processing tasks. Giraffe has been praised for its extraction, coding, and mathematics capabilities, outperforming other open-source models. However, it requires significant computational power and fine-tuning for retrieval accuracy.
Conclusion:
The open-source AI landscape is expanding rapidly, with a range of LLMs offering diverse capabilities. The models discussed in this article represent just a fraction of the advancements made in 2023. As these models continue to be fine-tuned and new iterations are released, the possibilities for open-source AI solutions will continue to grow. Whether you're a developer, researcher, or AI enthusiast, keeping an eye on these top LLMs in 2024 will provide valuable insights into the evolving field of open-source AI.
