Databricks’ Dolly is an instruction-following large language model trained on the Databricks machine learning platform that is licensed for commercial use. Based on pythia-12b, Dolly is trained on ~15k instruction/response fine tuning records databricks-dolly-15k generated by Databricks employees in capability domains from the InstructGPT paper, including brainstorming, classification, closed QA, generation, information extraction, open QA and summarization. dolly-v2-12b is not a state-of-the-art model, but does exhibit surprisingly high quality instruction following behavior not characteristic of the foundation model on which it is based.

Databricks is committed to ensuring that every organization and individual benefits from the transformative power of artificial intelligence. The Dolly model family represents our first steps along this journey, and we’re excited to share this technology with the world.

The model is available on Hugging Face as databricks/dolly-v2-12b.

dolly-v2-12b is a 12 billion parameter causal language model created by Databricks that is derived from EleutherAI’s Pythia-12b and fine-tuned on a ~15K record instruction corpus generated by Databricks employees and released under a permissive license (CC-BY-SA)

dolly-v2-12b is not a state-of-the-art generative language model and, though quantitative benchmarking is ongoing, is not designed to perform competitively with more modern model architectures or models subject to larger pretraining corpuses.

The Dolly model family is under active development, and so any list of shortcomings is unlikely to be exhaustive, but we include known limitations and misfires here as a means to document and share our preliminary findings with the community. In particular, dolly-v2-12b struggles with: syntactically complex prompts, programming problems, mathematical operations, factual errors, dates and times, open-ended question answering, hallucination, enumerating lists of specific length, stylistic mimicry, having a sense of humor, etc. Moreover, we find that dolly-v2-12b does not have some capabilities, such as well-formatted letter writing, present in the original model.

Like all language models, dolly-v2-12b reflects the content and limitations of its training corpuses.

• The Pile: GPT-J’s pre-training corpus contains content mostly collected from the public internet, and like most web-scale datasets, it contains content many users would find objectionable. As such, the model is likely to reflect these shortcomings, potentially overtly in the case it is explicitly asked to produce objectionable content, and sometimes subtly, as in the case of biased or harmful implicit associations.

• databricks-dolly-15k: The training data on which dolly-v2-12b is instruction tuned represents natural language instructions generated by Databricks employees during a period spanning March and April 2023 and includes passages from Wikipedia as references passages for instruction categories like closed QA and summarization. To our knowledge it does not contain obscenity, intellectual property or personally identifying information about non-public figures, but it may contain typos and factual errors. The dataset may also reflect biases found in Wikipedia. Finally, the dataset likely reflects the interests and semantic choices of Databricks employees, a demographic which is not representative of the global population at large.

Databricks is committed to ongoing research and development efforts to develop helpful, honest and harmless AI technologies that maximize the potential of all individuals and organizations.

If you'd like to simply test the model without training, the model is available on Hugging Face as databricks/dolly-v2-12b.

To use the model with the transformers library on a machine with A100 GPUs:

from transformers import pipeline
import torch

instruct_pipeline = pipeline(model="databricks/dolly-v2-12b", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, trust_remote_code=True, device_map="auto")

You can then use the pipeline to answer instructions:

instruct_pipeline("Explain to me the difference between nuclear fission and fusion.")

A100 instance types are not available in all cloud regions, or can be hard to provision. Inference is possible on other GPU instance types.

The 6.9B and 2.8B param models should work as-is.

To generate using the 12B param model on A10s (ex: g5.4xlarge, 1 x A10 24GB), it's necessary to load and run generating using 8-bit weights, which impacts the results slightly:

• Also install bitsandbytes
• Add model_kwargs={'load_in_8bit': True} to the pipeline() command shown above

When using V100s (ex: p3.2xlarge, 1 x V100 16GB, NC6s_v3), in all cases, set torch_dtype=torch.float16 in pipeline() instead.

Otherwise, follow the steps above. The 12B param model may not function well in 8-bit on V100s.

• Add the dolly repo to Databricks (under Repos click Add Repo, enter https://github.com/databrickslabs/dolly.git, then click Create Repo).
• Start a 12.2 LTS ML (includes Apache Spark 3.3.2, GPU, Scala 2.12) single-node cluster with node type having 8 A100 GPUs (e.g. Standard_ND96asr_v4 or p4d.24xlarge). Note that these instance types may not be available in all regions, or may be difficult to provision. In Databricks, note that you must select the GPU runtime first, and unselect "Use Photon", for these instance types to appear (where supported).
• Open the train_dolly notebook in the Repo (which is the train_dolly.py file in the Github dolly repo), attach to your GPU cluster, and run all cells. When training finishes, the notebook will save the model under /dbfs/dolly_training.

A100 instance types are not available in all cloud regions, or can be hard to provision. Training is possible on other GPU instance types, for smaller Dolly model sizes, and with small modifications to reduce memory usage. These modifications are not optimal, but are simple to make.

Training the 12B param model is not recommended on A10s.

To train the 6.9B param model on A10 instances (ex: g5.24xlarge, 4 x A10 24GB; Standard_NV72ads_A10_v5, 2 x A10), make the following changes:

• Set per-device-train-batch-size and per-device-eval-batch-size to 3 in the train_dolly.py invocation of deepspeed
• Modify the deepspeed config file ds_z3_bf16_config.json to configure optimizer offload. Within the "zero_optimization" section, add:

  "offload_optimizer": {
    "device": "cpu",
    "pin_memory": true
  },
  

• Set the num_gpus widget in train_dolly to the number of GPUs in your instance, such as 2 or 4, before running

To train the 2.8B param model:

• Instead, only set per-device-train-batch-size and per-device-eval-batch-size to 3 in the train_dolly.py invocation of deepspeed

To run on V100 instances with 32GB of GPU memory (ex: p3dn.24xlarge or Standard_ND40rs_v2), follow instructions above, and add:

• Modify training/trainer.py to disable bf16 and enable fp16 in TrainingArguments:

  ...
  fp16=True,
  bf16=False,
  ...
  

You may be able to slightly increase the batch size with 32GB instances, compared to what works above for 24GB A10s.

pyenv local 3.8.13
python -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
./run_pytest.sh