StarCoder: The Top Coding Assistant and Steps to Deploy It on E2E Cloud

September 14, 2023

What Is an AI Copilot?

Code LLMs, famously known as AI Copilots, enables developers to write code more efficiently by providing suggestions for code completion, write high-quality maintainable code, avail automatic code explanations, and more. Developers are now empowered to code and generate solutions to problems using natural language. These AI systems allow interacting with the IDE and developing software solutions to be done in a much more natural way.

What Is Starcoder?

StarCoder is a Large Language Model released by BigCoden aimed to act as an AI copilot for developers. It aims to do multiple chores like acting as a technical assistant, auto completing code, making code modifications and explaining code snippets through natural language. The base model is called StarCoderBase and StarCoder is a result of fine-tuning it on 35 billion Python tokens.

StarCoder and Its Capabilities

StarCoder is a part of the BigCode project. It is a joint effort of ServiceNow and Hugging Face. BigCode is an effort to build open-source AI tools around code generation. As a result, StarCoder has been made available under an OpenRAIL licence for usage by the community.

The model was trained across 86 programming languages through permissively licensed data from GitHub. All the languages ranked within the top 50 for the most popular languages have been included. All of these languages had an individual dataset size of more than 500 MB leading to a total training on 1 trillion tokens for the final model. The data included GitHub commits, issues (enabling it to act as technical assistant) and notebooks (Jupyter). The final model is on the smaller side with 15 billion parameters trained on 1 trillion tokens. StarCoderBase was then fine-tuned on 35 billion Python tokens for 2 epochs. The final dataset used to train the entire model has a total size of 815 GB.

StarCoder has been made open source under the OpenRAIL licence. The licence allows open access, use and distribution of licenced material like AI artefacts for which it is primarily designed. The licence promotes ‘Open’ and ‘Responsible’ use of the product which holds it. As for StarCoder, it is allowed to be used, modified, distributed and made derivatives under some conditions/restrictions enforced by its licence such as:

Attribution
Transparency
Ethical use
Data protection
No endorsement

Steps to Deploy and Use StarCoder Locally

Here we will be discussing setting up StarCoder on a TIR notebook environment on E2E Cloud.

Set up your environment and install the libraries.


# Install transformers library
!pip install transformers
# Install huggingface_hub
!pip install --upgrade huggingface_hub

‍


from huggingface_hub import login
login()

‍

Obtain permissions for using the model from here.

Import the libraries and download the model from Hugging Face.


from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch


checkpoint = "bigcode/starcoder"
device = "cuda" # for GPU usage or "cpu" for CPU usage


tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(checkpoint)
# to save memory consider using fp16 or bf16 by specifying torch_dtype=torch.float16 for example
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(checkpoint, torch_dtype=torch.float16).to(device)

Run the model through a custom input as an argument to tokenizer.encode()


inputs = tokenizer.encode("def print_hello_world():", return_tensors="pt").to(device)
outputs = model.generate(inputs)
# clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False prevents a tokenizer edge case which can result in spaces being removed around punctuation
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], clean_up_tokenization_spaces=False))

Benefits of Using StarCoder vs Proprietary AI Copilots

Proprietary AI copilots such as GitHub Copilot are designed to work with specific IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) even if they provide support to many languages. This is due to their closed source nature and thereby the lack of flexibility on how they can be used and where they can be integrated. Proprietary copilots can also be kept under a paywall when the company pleases it and thereby access/usage can be disrupted under various unfavourable conditions. Changes and modifications that suit the particular user/benefit users would be less negotiable unlike in an open source project like StarCoder. StarCoder and its open source nature allows it to be freely accessed and used by individuals and organisations alike, freely integrated to their IDEs and other softwares, updates and changes all monitored and kept in favour of the growth of the entire community.

How Enterprises Can Leverage StarCoder to Power Their Programmers and R&D

How Was StarCoder Trained and How Expensive Can It Get?

The StarCoderBase model was trained on 512 Nvidia A100 80 GB GPUs distributed across 64 nodes. With various parallelization and other optimizations during training, the base model took a total of 24 days of training and a power usage of 280W per GPU. The fine-tuning of the model in the same set-up to produce StarCoder took 3.5% of the original training time under the same hardware conditions. Again, StarCoder is a fine-tuned Python version of the base model trained for 2 epochs on the original data’s Python subset.

The final power consumption estimate for the training is 89671.68 kWh. The total time it took for training the GPU was 24 days. The cheapest rate of renting an A100 80GB GPU from E2E Cloud for an hour is approximately $3.39. We need a total of 512 such GPUs giving a cost of $1735.68/hour. Our total training time was 576 hours. A rough estimate of the final cost for just training StarCoderBase would be $999K. Now fine-tuning adds around 3.5% of the original training time. This gives a total final cost of $1.03 million. All this is a rough estimate by factoring in purely the E2E Cloud GPU rental costs.

How Beneficial Is Such a Tool for an Enterprise?

Code LLMs enable people from all backgrounds to write higher quality code and, thereby, develop no-code/low-code applications. This greatly enhances what can be done through a given amount of knowledge and skill – enabling access to technology in much wider hands.

Enterprises can use these LLMs to help their developers write high-quality code all the time, which is very important for the maintenance of a lot of applications which are mission critical. Effort spent on refactoring low-quality code can be used elsewhere, thereby saving massively on cost. This can also help relatively early developers to easily learn and implement good quality maintainable systems, which makes the entire process more worthwhile.

The usage of Code LLMs like StarCoder is useful for businesses of all sizes. They have various benefits like automating code generation and improving code quality – all of which leads to greatly enhanced speed and efficiency in software development. The time and effort gained from deploying such a tool cannot be overstated.

Conclusion

StarCoder is a tool that distributes the power of Code LLMs into the hands of all individuals and enterprises. Its open-source nature allows state-of-the-art code generation capabilities to be availed for free by the masses, thereby fueling a great increase in productivity and learning. Models like these encourage research and funding into the open-source AI community as well.

Sign up for Free Trial

Latest Blogs

October 3, 2024

Step-by-Step Guide to Fine-Tune Flux.1 with AI Toolkit and Generate Images for Ecommerce

September 19, 2024

Comparing Flux.1 and Stable Diffusion - A Technical Deep Dive

October 18, 2022

A Complete Guide To Customer Acquisition For Startups

Any business is enlivened by its customers. Therefore, a strategy to constantly bring in new clients is an ongoing requirement. In this regard, having a proper customer acquisition strategy can be of great importance.

So, if you are just starting your business, or planning to expand it, read on to learn more about this concept.

The problem with customer acquisition

As an organization, when working in a diverse and competitive market like India, you need to have a well-defined customer acquisition strategy to attain success. However, this is where most startups struggle. Now, you may have a great product or service, but if you are not in the right place targeting the right demographic, you are not likely to get the results you want.

To resolve this, typically, companies invest, but if that is not channelized properly, it will be futile.

So, the best way out of this dilemma is to have a clear customer acquisition strategy in place.

How can you create the ideal customer acquisition strategy for your business?

Define what your goals are

You need to define your goals so that you can meet the revenue expectations you have for the current fiscal year. You need to find a value for the metrics –

MRR – Monthly recurring revenue, which tells you all the income that can be generated from all your income channels.
CLV – Customer lifetime value tells you how much a customer is willing to spend on your business during your mutual relationship duration.
CAC – Customer acquisition costs, which tells how much your organization needs to spend to acquire customers constantly.
Churn rate – It tells you the rate at which customers stop doing business.

All these metrics tell you how well you will be able to grow your business and revenue.

Identify your ideal customers

You need to understand who your current customers are and who your target customers are. Once you are aware of your customer base, you can focus your energies in that direction and get the maximum sale of your products or services. You can also understand what your customers require through various analytics and markers and address them to leverage your products/services towards them.

Choose your channels for customer acquisition

How will you acquire customers who will eventually tell at what scale and at what rate you need to expand your business? You could market and sell your products on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, or invest in paid marketing like Google Ads. You need to develop a unique strategy for each of these channels.

Communicate with your customers

If you know exactly what your customers have in mind, then you will be able to develop your customer strategy with a clear perspective in mind. You can do it through surveys or customer opinion forms, email contact forms, blog posts and social media posts. After that, you just need to measure the analytics, clearly understand the insights, and improve your strategy accordingly.

Combining these strategies with your long-term business plan will bring results. However, there will be challenges on the way, where you need to adapt as per the requirements to make the most of it. At the same time, introducing new technologies like AI and ML can also solve such issues easily. To learn more about the use of AI and ML and how they are transforming businesses, keep referring to the blog section of E2E Networks.

‍

Reference Links

https://www.helpscout.com/customer-acquisition/

https://www.cloudways.com/blog/customer-acquisition-strategy-for-startups/

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-acquisition

This is a decorative image for: Constructing 3D objects through Deep Learning

October 18, 2022

Image-based 3D Object Reconstruction State-of-the-Art and trends in the Deep Learning Era

3D reconstruction is one of the most complex issues of deep learning systems. There have been multiple types of research in this field, and almost everything has been tried on it — computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning, but to no avail. However, that has resulted in CNN or convolutional neural networks foraying into this field, which has yielded some success.

The Main Objective of the 3D Object Reconstruction

Developing this deep learning technology aims to infer the shape of 3D objects from 2D images. So, to conduct the experiment, you need the following:

Highly calibrated cameras that take a photograph of the image from various angles.
Large training datasets can predict the geometry of the object whose 3D image reconstruction needs to be done. These datasets can be collected from a database of images, or they can be collected and sampled from a video.

By using the apparatus and datasets, you will be able to proceed with the 3D reconstruction from 2D datasets.

State-of-the-art Technology Used by the Datasets for the Reconstruction of 3D Objects

The technology used for this purpose needs to stick to the following parameters:

Input

Training with the help of one or multiple RGB images, where the segmentation of the 3D ground truth needs to be done. It could be one image, multiple images or even a video stream.

The testing will also be done on the same parameters, which will also help to create a uniform, cluttered background, or both.

Output

The volumetric output will be done in both high and low resolution, and the surface output will be generated through parameterisation, template deformation and point cloud. Moreover, the direct and intermediate outputs will be calculated this way.

Network architecture used

The architecture used in training is 3D-VAE-GAN, which has an encoder and a decoder, with TL-Net and conditional GAN. At the same time, the testing architecture is 3D-VAE, which has an encoder and a decoder.

Training used

The degree of supervision used in 2D vs 3D supervision, weak supervision along with loss functions have to be included in this system. The training procedure is adversarial training with joint 2D and 3D embeddings. Also, the network architecture is extremely important for the speed and processing quality of the output images.

Practical applications and use cases

Volumetric representations and surface representations can do the reconstruction. Powerful computer systems need to be used for reconstruction.

Given below are some of the places where 3D Object Reconstruction Deep Learning Systems are used:

3D reconstruction technology can be used in the Police Department for drawing the faces of criminals whose images have been procured from a crime site where their faces are not completely revealed.
It can be used for re-modelling ruins at ancient architectural sites. The rubble or the debris stubs of structures can be used to recreate the entire building structure and get an idea of how it looked in the past.
They can be used in plastic surgery where the organs, face, limbs or any other portion of the body has been damaged and needs to be rebuilt.
It can be used in airport security, where concealed shapes can be used for guessing whether a person is armed or is carrying explosives or not.
It can also help in completing DNA sequences.

So, if you are planning to implement this technology, then you can rent the required infrastructure from E2E Networks and avoid investing in it. And if you plan to learn more about such topics, then keep a tab on the blog section of the website.

‍

Reference Links

https://tongtianta.site/paper/68922

https://github.com/natowi/3D-Reconstruction-with-Deep-Learning-Methods

This is a decorative image for: Comprehensive Guide to Deep Q-Learning for Data Science Enthusiasts

October 18, 2022

A Comprehensive Guide To Deep Q-Learning For Data Science Enthusiasts

For all data science enthusiasts who would love to dig deep, we have composed a write-up about Q-Learning specifically for you all. Deep Q-Learning and Reinforcement learning (RL) are extremely popular these days. These two data science methodologies use Python libraries like TensorFlow 2 and openAI’s Gym environment.

So, read on to know more.

What is Deep Q-Learning?

Deep Q-Learning utilizes the principles of Q-learning, but instead of using the Q-table, it uses the neural network. The algorithm of deep Q-Learning uses the states as input and the optimal Q-value of every action possible as the output. The agent gathers and stores all the previous experiences in the memory of the trained tuple in the following order:

State> Next state> Action> Reward

The neural network training stability increases using a random batch of previous data by using the experience replay. Experience replay also means the previous experiences stocking, and the target network uses it for training and calculation of the Q-network and the predicted Q-Value. This neural network uses openAI Gym, which is provided by taxi-v3 environments.

Now, any understanding of Deep Q-Learning is incomplete without talking about Reinforcement Learning.

What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement is a subsection of ML. This part of ML is related to the action in which an environmental agent participates in a reward-based system and uses Reinforcement Learning to maximize the rewards. Reinforcement Learning is a different technique from unsupervised learning or supervised learning because it does not require a supervised input/output pair. The number of corrections is also less, so it is a highly efficient technique.

Now, the understanding of reinforcement learning is incomplete without knowing about Markov Decision Process (MDP). MDP is involved with each state that has been presented in the results of the environment, derived from the state previously there. The information which composes both states is gathered and transferred to the decision process. The task of the chosen agent is to maximize the awards. The MDP optimizes the actions and helps construct the optimal policy.

For developing the MDP, you need to follow the Q-Learning Algorithm, which is an extremely important part of data science and machine learning.

What is Q-Learning Algorithm?

The process of Q-Learning is important for understanding the data from scratch. It involves defining the parameters, choosing the actions from the current state and also choosing the actions from the previous state and then developing a Q-table for maximizing the results or output rewards.

The 4 steps that are involved in Q-Learning:

Initializing parameters – The RL (reinforcement learning) model learns the set of actions that the agent requires in the state, environment and time.
Identifying current state – The model stores the prior records for optimal action definition for maximizing the results. For acting in the present state, the state needs to be identified and perform an action combination for it.
Choosing the optimal action set and gaining the relevant experience – A Q-table is generated from the data with a set of specific states and actions, and the weight of this data is calculated for updating the Q-Table to the following step.
Updating Q-table rewards and next state determination – After the relevant experience is gained and agents start getting environmental records. The reward amplitude helps to present the subsequent step.

In case the Q-table size is huge, then the generation of the model is a time-consuming process. This situation requires Deep Q-learning.

Hopefully, this write-up has provided an outline of Deep Q-Learning and its related concepts. If you wish to learn more about such topics, then keep a tab on the blog section of the E2E Networks website.

Reference Links

https://analyticsindiamag.com/comprehensive-guide-to-deep-q-learning-for-data-science-enthusiasts/

https://medium.com/@jereminuerofficial/a-comprehensive-guide-to-deep-q-learning-8aeed632f52f

October 13, 2022

GAUDI: A Neural Architect for Immersive 3D Scene Generation

The evolution of artificial intelligence in the past decade has been staggering, and now the focus is shifting towards AI and ML systems to understand and generate 3D spaces. As a result, there has been extensive research on manipulating 3D generative models. In this regard, Apple’s AI and ML scientists have developed GAUDI, a method specifically for this job.

An introduction to GAUDI

The GAUDI 3D immersive technique founders named it after the famous architect Antoni Gaudi. This AI model takes the help of a camera pose decoder, which enables it to guess the possible camera angles of a scene. Hence, the decoder then makes it possible to predict the 3D canvas from almost every angle.

What does GAUDI do?

GAUDI can perform multiple functions –

The extensions of these generative models have a tremendous effect on ML and computer vision. Pragmatically, such models are highly useful. They are applied in model-based reinforcement learning and planning world models, SLAM is s, or 3D content creation.
Generative modelling for 3D objects has been used for generating scenes using graf, pigan, and gsn, which incorporate a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). The generator codes radiance fields exclusively. Using the 3D space in the scene along with the camera pose generates the 3D image from that point. This point has a density scalar and RGB value for that specific point in 3D space. This can be done from a 2D camera view. It does this by imposing 3D datasets on those 2D shots. It isolates various objects and scenes and combines them to render a new scene altogether.
GAUDI also removes GANs pathologies like mode collapse and improved GAN.
GAUDI also uses this to train data on a canonical coordinate system. You can compare it by looking at the trajectory of the scenes.

How is GAUDI applied to the content?

The steps of application for GAUDI have been given below:

Each trajectory is created, which consists of a sequence of posed images (These images are from a 3D scene) encoded into a latent representation. This representation which has a radiance field or what we refer to as the 3D scene and the camera path is created in a disentangled way. The results are interpreted as free parameters. The problem is optimized by and formulation of a reconstruction objective.
This simple training process is then scaled to trajectories, thousands of them creating a large number of views. The model samples the radiance fields totally from the previous distribution that the model has learned.
The scenes are thus synthesized by interpolation within the hidden space.
The scaling of 3D scenes generates many scenes that contain thousands of images. During training, there is no issue related to canonical orientation or mode collapse.
A novel de-noising optimization technique is used to find hidden representations that collaborate in modelling the camera poses and the radiance field to create multiple datasets with state-of-the-art performance in generating 3D scenes by building a setup that uses images and text.

To conclude, GAUDI has more capabilities and can also be used for sampling various images and video datasets. Furthermore, this will make a foray into AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality). With GAUDI in hand, the sky is only the limit in the field of media creation. So, if you enjoy reading about the latest development in the field of AI and ML, then keep a tab on the blog section of the E2E Networks website.

‍

Reference Links

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362323995_GAUDI_A_Neural_Architect_for_Immersive_3D_Scene_Generation

https://www.technology.org/2022/07/31/gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation/

https://www.patentlyapple.com/2022/08/apple-has-unveiled-gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation.html