Akshay πŸš€ Profile picture
May 8, 2024 β€’ 10 tweets β€’ 3 min read β€’ Read on X
How LLMs work, clearly explained:
Before diving into LLMs, we must understand conditional probability.

Let's consider a population of 14 individuals:

- Some of them like Tennis 🎾
- Some like Football ⚽️
- A few like both 🎾 ⚽️
- And few like none

Here's how it looks πŸ‘‡ Image
So what is Conditional probability ⁉️

It's a measure of the probability of an event given that another event has occurred.

If the events are A and B, we denote this as P(A|B).

This reads as "probability of A given B"

Check this illustration πŸ‘‡ Image
For instance, if we're predicting whether it will rain today (event A), knowing that it's cloudy (event B) might impact our prediction.

As it's more likely to rain when it's cloudy, we'd say the conditional probability P(A|B) is high.

That's conditional probability for you! πŸŽ‰
Now, how does this apply to LLMs like GPT-4❓

These models are tasked with predicting the next word in a sequence.

This is a question of conditional probability: given the words that have come before, what is the most likely next word? Image
To predict the next word, the model calculates the conditional probability for each possible next word, given the previous words (context).

The word with the highest conditional probability is chosen as the prediction. Image
The LLM learns a high-dimensional probability distribution over sequences of words.

And the parameters of this distribution are the trained weights!

The training or rather pre-training** is supervised.

I'll talk about the different training steps next time!**

Check this πŸ‘‡ Image
Hopefully, this thread has demystified a bit of the magic behind LLMs and the concept of conditional probability.

Here's the gist of what we learned today: Image
Working with LLMs is going to to be a high leverage skill!

@LightningAI provides state of the art tutorials on LLMs & LLMOps!

An integrated AI developer platform with access to FREE GPUs & VSCode right in your browser!

Check this: lightning.ai/lightning-ai/h…
If you interested in:

- Python 🐍
- Machine Learning πŸ€–
- AI Engineering βš™οΈ

Find me β†’ @akshay_pachaar βœ”οΈ
My weekly Newsletter on AI Engineering, Join 9k+ readers: @ML_Spring

Cheers! πŸ₯‚

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More from @akshay_pachaar

Dec 18
Turn any Autoregressive LLM into a Diffusion LM.

dLLM is a Python library that unifies the training & evaluation of diffusion language models.

You can also use it to turn ANY autoregressive LM into a diffusion LM with minimal compute.

100% open-source.
Here's why this matters:

Traditional autoregressive models generate text left-to-right, one token at a time. Diffusion models work differently - they refine the entire sequence iteratively, giving you better control over generation quality and more flexible editing capabilities.
dLLM GitHub:

(don't forget to star 🌟)github.com/ZHZisZZ/dllm
Read 4 tweets
Dec 6
You're in a Research Scientist interview at Google.

Interviewer: We have a base LLM that's terrible at maths. How would you turn it into a maths & reasoning powerhouse?

You: I'll get some problems labeled and fine-tune the model.

Interview over.

Here's what you missed:
When outputs are verifiable, labels become optional.

Maths, code, and logic can be automatically checked and validated.

Let's use this fact to build a reasoning model without manual labelling.

We'll use:

- @UnslothAI for parameter-efficient finetuning.
- @HuggingFace TRL to apply GRPO.

Let's go! πŸš€
What is GRPO?

Group Relative Policy Optimization is a reinforcement learning method that fine-tunes LLMs for math and reasoning tasks using deterministic reward functions, eliminating the need for labeled data.

Here's a brief overview of GRPO before we jump into code:
Read 11 tweets
Dec 5
I have been training neural networks for 10 years now.

Here are 16 ways I actively use to optimize model training:

(detailed explanation ...🧡)
First, lets look at some basic techniques:

1) Use efficient optimizersβ€”AdamW, Adam, etc.

2) Utilize hardware accelerators (GPUs/TPUs).

3) Max out the batch size.

4) Use multi-GPU training through Model/Data/Pipeline/Tensor parallelism.

Check the visualπŸ‘‡
5) Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter optimization:

This technique takes informed steps based on the results of the previous hyperparameter configs.

This way, the model converges to an optimal set of hyperparameters much faster.

Check these results πŸ‘‡ Image
Read 9 tweets
Nov 23
You’re in an ML Engineer interview at Google.

Interviewer: We need to train an LLM across 1,000 GPUs. How would you make sure all GPUs share what they learn?

You: Use a central parameter server to aggregate and redistribute the weights.

Interview over.

Here’s what you missed:
One major run-time bottleneck in multi-GPU training happens during GPU synchronization.

For instance, in multi-GPU training via data parallelism:

- The same model is distributed to different GPUs.
- Each GPU processes a different subset of the whole dataset.

Check this πŸ‘‡
This leads to different gradients across different devices.

So, before updating the model parameters on each GPU device, we must communicate the gradients to all other devices to sync them.

Let’s understand 2 common strategies next!
Read 14 tweets
Nov 21
NOBODY wants to send their data to Google or OpenAI.

Yet here we are, shipping proprietary code, customer information, and sensitive business logic to closed-source APIs we don't control.

While everyone's chasing the latest closed-source releases, open-source models are quietly becoming the practical choice for many production systems.

Here's what everyone is missing:

Open-source models are catching up fast, and they bring something the big labs can't: privacy, speed, and control.

I built a playground to test this myself. Used CometML's Opik to evaluate models on real code generation tasks - testing correctness, readability, and best practices against actual GitHub repos.

Here's what surprised me:

OSS models like MiniMax-M2, Kimi k2 performed on par with the likes of Gemini 3 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 on most tasks.

But practically MiniMax-M2 turns out to be a winner as it's twice as fast and 12x cheaper when you compare it to models like Sonnet 4.5.

Well, this isn't just about saving money.

When your model is smaller and faster, you can deploy it in places closed-source APIs can't reach:

↳ Real-time applications that need sub-second responses
↳ Edge devices where latency kills user experience
↳ On-premise systems where data never leaves your infrastructure

MiniMax-M2 runs with only 10B activated parameters. That efficiency means lower latency, higher throughput, and the ability to handle interactive agents without breaking the bank.

The intelligence-to-cost ratio here changes what's possible.

You're not choosing between quality and affordability anymore. You're not sacrificing privacy for performance. The gap is closing, and in many cases, it's already closed.

If you're building anything that needs to be fast, private, or deployed at scale, it's worth taking a look at what's now available.

MiniMax-M2 is 100% open-source, free for developers right now. I have shared the link to their GitHub repo in the next tweet.

You will also find the code for the playground and evaluations I've done.
@MiniMax__AI GitHub repo for M2:

(don't forget to star 🌟)
github.com/MiniMax-AI/Min…
@MiniMax__AI Find the code for the playground and the evaluation done using @Cometml Opik: github.com/patchy631/ai-e…
Read 4 tweets
Oct 27
Claude Skills might be the biggest upgrade to AI agents so far!

Some say it's even bigger than MCP.

I've been testing skills for the past 3-4 days, and they're solving a problem most people don't talk about: agents just keep forgetting everything.

In this video, I'll share everything I've learned so far.

It covers:

> The core idea (skills as SOPs for agents)
> Anatomy of a skill
> Skills vs. MCP vs. Projects vs. Subagents
> Building your own skill
> Hands-on example

Skills are the early signs of continual learning, and they can change how we work with agents forever!

Here's everything you need to know:
Skills vs. Projects vs. Subagents: Image
If you found it insightful, reshare with your network.

Find me β†’ @akshay_pachaar βœ”οΈ
For more insights and tutorials on LLMs, AI Agents, and Machine Learning!
Read 4 tweets

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