Pretrain Vision and Large Language Models in Python

Preface

So, you want to work with foundation models? That is an excellent place to begin! Many of us in the machine learning community have followed these curious creatures for years, from their earliest onset in the first days of the Transformer models, to their expansion in computer vision, to the near ubiquitous presence of text generation and interactive dialogue we see in the world today.

But where do foundation models come from? How do they work? What makes them tick, and when should you pretrain and fine-tune them? How can you eke out performance gains on your datasets and applications? How many accelerators do you need? What does an end-to-end application look like, and how can you use foundation models to master this new surge of interest ...