No, it's not AI, just photos of the saiga antelope, a hold out with roots in the ice age, living in the plains of Siberia, and sadly endangered now. I love these faces!
With the growing demand for deploying large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications, improving their inference efficiency is crucial for sustainable and democratized access. However, retraining LLMs to meet new user-specific requirements is prohibitively expensive and environmentally unsustainable. In this work, we propose a practical and scalable alternative: composing efficient hybrid language models from existing pre-trained models. Our approach, Zebra-Llama, introduces a family of 1B, 3B, and 8B hybrid models by combining State Space Models (SSMs) and Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) layers, using a refined initialization and post-training pipeline to efficiently transfer knowledge from pre-trained Transformers. Zebra-Llama achieves Transformer-level accuracy with near-SSM efficiency using only 7-11B training tokens (compared to trillions of tokens required for pre-training) and an 8B teacher. Moreover, Zebra-Llama dramatically reduces KV cache size -down to 3.9%, 2%, and 2.73% of the original for the 1B, 3B, and 8B variants, respectively-while preserving 100%, 100%, and >97% of average zero-shot performance on LM Harness tasks. Compared to models like MambaInLLaMA, X-EcoMLA, Minitron, and Llamba, Zebra-Llama consistently delivers competitive or superior accuracy while using significantly fewer tokens, smaller teachers, and vastly reduced KV cache memory. Notably, Zebra-Llama-8B surpasses Minitron-8B in few-shot accuracy by 7% while using 8x fewer training tokens, over 12x smaller KV cache, and a smaller teacher (8B vs. 15B). It also achieves 2.6x-3.8x higher throughput (tokens/s) than MambaInLlama up to a 32k context length. We will release code and model checkpoints upon acceptance.
Modern zoos didn’t spring from goodwill—they rose from empire.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, exotic animals became status symbols, diplomatic tokens, and scientific “specimens.”
Behind every cage was a story of power, theft, and spectacle.
🔗 https://brewminate.com/the-exotic-animal-trade-and-the-invention-of-the-global-zoo-1700-1900/
#Brewminate #AnimalHistory #Zoos #Colonialism #ExoticAnimals
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(3) The government plans to reshape the El Valle de los Caídos site to honor those affected by Franco’s dictatorship rather than commemorate him.
(4) The police arrested a couple in Mallorca for illegally breeding and selling exotic cats.
Listen to the full stories and more in the latest episode of the Update! Link in bio - @rorshok.spain
Picture credits: [Reuters, Barcelonia Catelonia, NYT, CNN]
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