IBM and Red Hat’s new open-source project is designed to lower the cost of fine-tuning large language models by allowing people to collaboratively a

The technology behind InstructLab, a low-cost way to customize LLMs

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2024-10-30 02:30:06

IBM and Red Hat’s new open-source project is designed to lower the cost of fine-tuning large language models by allowing people to collaboratively add new knowledge and skills to any model.

Large language models are flourishing in the open, but most are still built in silos. Communities can form around a model, but their contributions can take months or years to be merged back to the base model — if they make their way back at all.

“There’s no good way to combine all of that innovation into a coherent whole,” said David Cox, vice president for AI models at IBM Research.

InstructLab, an open-source project launched by IBM and Red Hat in May, is designed to change that. It gives communities the tools to create and merge changes to LLMs without having to retrain the model from scratch. By making LLMs more like any other open-source software project, IBM and Red Hat hope to democratize access to generative AI.