Mistral Small 22B just dropped today and I am blown away by how good it is. I was already impressed with Mistral NeMo 12B’s abilities, so I didn’t know how much better a 22B could be. It passes really tough obscure trivia that NeMo couldn’t, and its reasoning abilities are even more refined.
With Mistral Small I have finally reached the plateu of what my hardware can handle for my personal usecase. I need my AI to be able to at least generate around my base reading speed. The lowest I can tolerate is 1.5~T/s lower than that is unacceptable. I really doubted that a 22B could even run on my measly Nvidia GTX 1070 8G VRRAM card and 16GB DDR4 RAM. Nemo ran at about 5.5t/s on this system, so how would Small do?
Mistral Small Q4_KM runs at 2.5T/s with 28 layers offloaded onto VRAM. As context increases that number goes to 1.7T/s. It is absolutely usable for real time conversation needs. I would like the token speed to be faster sure, and have considered going with the lowest Q4 recommended to help balance the speed a little. However, I am very happy just to have it running and actually usable in real time. Its crazy to me that such a seemingly advanced model fits on my modest hardware.
Im a little sad now though, since this is as far as I think I can go in the AI self hosting frontier without investing in a beefier card. Do I need a bigger smarter model than Mistral Small 22B? No. Hell, NeMo was serving me just fine. But now I want to know just how smart the biggest models get. I caught the AI Acquisition Syndrome!
Read up on Hermes3 technical paper and you’ll realize it’s the best one. Running 8B model with the correct initial system prompt makes it as smart as GPT4o
The linked paper was a good read. Thank you.
Ironically, if you ask ChatGPT to write you an initial system prompt for Hermes that will sound similar to its own, it will essentially share a trade secret with you and give up portions of its system prompt to make your 8B self hosted LLM perform like a commercial one.