api.NCSA.ai - LLMs for all

⭐️ https://api.NCSA.ai/ ⭐

Free & unbelievably easy LLaMA-2 inference for everyone at NCSA!

• It’s an API: I host it, you use it. Quick and easy for jobs big and small.
• Access it however you like: Python client, Curl/Postman, or a full web interface playground.
• It’s running on NCSA Center of AI Innovation GPUs, and is fully private & secure thanks to https connections via Zero Trust CloudFlare Tunnels.
• It works with LangChain 🦜🔗

Beautiful implementation detail: it’s a perfect clone of the OpenAI API, making my version a drop-in replacement for OpenAI calls (except embeddings). Say goodbye to huge OpenAI bills!:moneybag:

Usage

📜 I wrote beautiful usage docs & examples here 👀 It literally couldn’t be simpler to use 😇

🐍 In Python, it’s literally this easy:

import openai # pip install openai
openai.api_key = "irrelevant" # must be non-empty

# 👉 ONLY CODE CHANGE: use our GPUs instead of OpenAI's 👈
openai.api_base = "https://api.kastan.ai/v1"

# exact same api as normal!
completion = openai.Completion.create(
    model="llama-2-7b",
    prompt="What's the capitol of France?",
    max_tokens=200,
    temperature=0.7,
    stream=True)

# ⚡️⚡️ streaming
for token in completion:
  print(token.choices[0].text, end='')

🌐 Or from the command line:

curl https://api.kastan.ai/v1/completions \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -d '{ "prompt": "What is the capital of France?", "echo": true }'

UX Design Goals 🎯

1. 🧠⚡️ Flawless API support for the best LLM of the day.

   An exact clone of the OpenAI API, making it a drop-in replacement.

2. 🤗 Support for 100% of the models on HuggingFace Hub.

   Some will be easier to use than others.

Towards 100% Coverage of HuggingFace Hub

⭐️ S-Tier: For the best text LLM of the day, currently LLaMA-2 or Mistral, we offer persistant, ultra-low-latency inference with customized, fused, cuda kernels. This is suitable to build other applications on top of. Any app can now easily and reliably benefit from intelligence.

🥇 A-Tier: If you want a particular LLM, in the list of popular supported ones, that's fine too. They all have optimized inference cuda kernels.

👍 B-Tier: Most models on the HuggingFace Hub, all those that support AutoModel() and/or pipeline(). The only downside here is cold starts, download the model & loading it onto a GPU.

✨ C-Tier: Models that require custom pre/post-processing code, just supply your own load() and run() functions, typically copy-pasted from the Readme of a HuggingFace model card. Docs to come.

❌ F-Tier: The current status quo: every researcher doing this independently. It's slow, painful and usually extremely compute-wasteful.

Technical Design

Limitations with WIP solutions:

• Cuda-OOM errors: If your model doesn't fit on our 4xA40 (48 GB) server we return an error. Coming soon, we should fallback to accelerate ZeRO stage-3 (CPU/Disk offload). And/or allow a flag for quantization, load_in_8bit=True or load_in_4bit=True.
• Multi-node support. Currently it's only designed to loadbalance within a single node, soon we should use Ray Serve to support arbitrary hetrogeneous nodes.
• Advanced batching -- when the queue contains separate requests for the same model, batch them and run all jobs requesting that model before moving onto the next model (with a max of 15-20 minutes with any one model in memory, if we have other jobs waiting in the queue. This should balance efficiency, i.e. batching, with fairness, i.e. FIFO queuing).