Dolly
Databricks’ Dolly is an instruction-following large language model trained on the Databricks machine learning platform
that is licensed for commercial use. Based on pythia-12b, Dolly is trained on ~15k instruction/response fine tuning records
databricks-dolly-15k generated
by Databricks employees in capability domains from the InstructGPT paper, including brainstorming, classification, closed QA, generation,
information extraction, open QA and summarization. dolly-v2-12b is not a state-of-the-art model, but does exhibit surprisingly
high quality instruction following behavior not characteristic of the foundation model on which it is based.
Databricks is committed to ensuring that every organization and individual benefits from the transformative power of artificial intelligence. The Dolly model family represents our first steps along this journey, and we’re excited to share this technology with the world.
The model is available on Hugging Face as databricks/dolly-v2-12b.
Model Overview
dolly-v2-12b is a 12 billion parameter causal language model created by Databricks that is derived from
EleutherAI’s Pythia-12b and fine-tuned
on a ~15K record instruction corpus generated by Databricks employees and released under a permissive license (CC-BY-SA)
Known Limitations
dolly-v2-12b is not a state-of-the-art generative language model and, though quantitative benchmarking is ongoing, is not designed to perform
competitively with more modern model architectures or models subject to larger pretraining corpuses.
The Dolly model family is under active development, and so any list of shortcomings is unlikely to be exhaustive, but we include known limitations and misfires here as a means to document and share our preliminary findings with the community.
In particular, dolly-v2-12b struggles with: syntactically complex prompts, programming problems, mathematical operations, factual errors,
dates and times, open-ended question answering, hallucination, enumerating lists of specific length, stylistic mimicry, having a sense of humor, etc.
Moreover, we find that dolly-v2-12b does not have some capabilities, such as well-formatted letter writing, present in the original model.
Dataset Limitations
Like all language models, dolly-v2-12b reflects the content and limitations of its training corpuses.
The Pile: GPT-J’s pre-training corpus contains content mostly collected from the public internet, and like most web-scale datasets,
it contains content many users would find objectionable. As such, the model is likely to reflect these shortcomings, potentially overtly
in the case it is explicitly asked to produce objectionable content, and sometimes subtly, as in the case of biased or harmful implicit
associations.
databricks-dolly-15k: The training data on which dolly-v2-12b is instruction tuned represents natural language instructions generated
by Databricks employees during a period spanning March and April 2023 and includes passages from Wikipedia as references passages
for instruction categories like closed QA and summarization. To our knowledge it does not contain obscenity, intellectual property or
personally identifying information about non-public figures, but it may contain typos and factual errors.
The dataset may also reflect biases found in Wikipedia. Finally, the dataset likely reflects
the interests and semantic choices of Databricks employees, a demographic which is not representative of the global population at large.
Databricks is committed to ongoing research and development efforts to develop helpful, honest and harmless AI technologies that
maximize the potential of all individuals and organizations.
Getting Started with Response Generation
If you'd like to simply test the model without training, the model is available on Hugging Face as databricks/dolly-v2-12b.
To use the model with the transformers library on a machine with A100 GPUs:
from transformers import pipeline
import torch
instruct_pipeline = pipeline(model="databricks/dolly-v2-12b", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, trust_remote_code=True, device_map="auto")
You can then use the pipeline to answer instructions:
instruct_pipeline("Explain to me the difference between nuclear fission and fusion.")
Generating on Other Instances
A100 instance types are not available in all cloud regions, or can be hard to provision. Inference is possible on other GPU instance types.
A10 GPUs
The 6.9B and 2.8B param models should work as-is.
To generate using the 12B param model on A10s (ex: g5.4xlarge, 1 x A10 24GB), it's necessary to load and run generating using 8-bit weights, which impacts the results slightly:
- Also install
bitsandbytes
- Add
model_kwargs={'load_in_8bit': True} to the pipeline() command shown above
V100 GPUs
When using V100s (ex: p3.2xlarge, 1 x V100 16GB, NC6s_v3), in all cases, set torch_dtype=torch.float16 in pipeline() instead.
Otherwise, follow the steps above. The 12B param model may not function well in 8-bit on V100s.
Getting Started with Training
- Add the
dolly repo to Databricks (under Repos click Add Repo, enter https://github.com/databrickslabs/dolly.git, then click Create Repo).
- Start a
13.x ML (includes Apache Spark 3.4.0, GPU, Scala 2.12) or later single-node cluster with node type having 8 A100 GPUs (e.g. Standard_ND96asr_v4 or p4d.24xlarge). Note that these instance types may not be available in all regions, or may be difficult to provision. In Databricks, note that you must select the GPU runtime first, and unselect "Use Photon", for these instance types to appear (where supported).
- Open the
train_dolly notebook in the Repo (which is the train_dolly.py file in the Github dolly repo), attach to your GPU cluster, and run all cells. When training finishes, the notebook will save the model under /dbfs/dolly_training.
Training on Other Instances
A100 instance types are not available in all cloud regions, or can be hard to provision. Training is possible on other GPU instance types,
for smaller Dolly model sizes, and with small modifications to reduce memory usage. These modifications are not optimal, but are simple to make.
Select your GPU family type from the gpu_family widget, enter the number of GPUs available in the num_gpus widget, and then run the rest of the code.
A number of different options will be set for you to train the model for one of the following GPU types:
Details of the different configurations are below.
A100 GPUs
A100 GPUs are preferred for training all model sizes, and are the only GPUs that can train the 12B param model in a reasonable amount of time.
As such, this is the default configuration, as set in the a100_config.json deepspeed config file.
A10 GPUs
Training the 12B param model is not recommended on A10s.
To train the 6.9B param model on A10 instances (ex: g5.24xlarge, 4 x A10 24GB; Standard_NV72ads_A10_v5, 2 x A10),
simply select a10 from the gpu_family widget and enter the number of GPUs available in the num_gpus widget, then run the rest of the code.
This will use the a10_config.json deepspeed config file, which makes the following changes:
V100 GPUs
To run on V100 instances with 32GB of GPU memory (ex: p3dn.24xlarge or Standard_ND40rs_v2),
simply select v100 from the gpu_family widget and enter the number of GPUs available in the num_gpus widget, and then run the rest of the code.
This will use the v100_config.json deepspeed config file, which makes the following changes:
- It makes the changes described above for A10s
- It enables fp16 floating point format
- It sets the
per-device-train-batch-size and per-device-eval-batch-size to 3
You may be able to slightly increase the batch size with 32GB instances, compared to what works above for 24GB A10s.
Running Unit Tests Locally
pyenv local 3.8.13
python -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
./run_pytest.sh
Citation
@online{DatabricksBlog2023DollyV2,
author = {Mike Conover and Matt Hayes and Ankit Mathur and Jianwei Xie and Jun Wan and Sam Shah and Ali Ghodsi and Patrick Wendell and Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin},
title = {Free Dolly: Introducing the World's First Truly Open Instruction-Tuned LLM},
year = {2023},
url = {https://www.databricks.com/blog/2023/04/12/dolly-first-open-commercially-viable-instruction-tuned-llm},
urldate = {2023-06-30}
}
Dolly 是 Databricks 的指令跟随型大语言模型，在 Databricks 机器学习平台上训练，并授权可商用；旗舰模型 dolly-v2-12b 基于 EleutherAI 的 Pythia-12b 开发。