Dippy Subnet: Creating The World's Best Open-Source Roleplay LLM

News: We are now on the mainnet with uid 11! Please join the Bittensor Discord and see us at Channel λ·lambda·11! Also, please check our Launch Tweet for our vision of creating the world's best open-source roleplay LLM. 05/10

DIPPY License: MIT



Introduction

Note: The following documentation assumes you are familiar with basic Bittensor concepts: Miners, Validators, and incentives. If you need a primer, please check out https://docs.bittensor.com/learn/bittensor-building-blocks.

The Dippy Roleplay subnet on Bittensor aims to create the world's best open-source roleplay LLM by leveraging the collective efforts of the open-source community. This subnet addresses the critical issue of loneliness, which affects a significant portion of the population and is linked to various mental and physical health problems.

Current SOTA LLMs (Claude, OpenAI etc.) are designed for the assistant use case and lack the empathetic qualities necessary for companionship. While some companies (c.ai, chai, inflection etc) have developed closed-source roleplay LLMs, the open-source alternatives lag significantly behind in performance.

Our team at Impel Intelligence Inc. knows this issue intimately through building Dippy, a proactive AI companion app for iOS. In this subnet, we will bring together the entire open-source eco-system to build the world’s best roleplay LLM.

Roadmap

Given the complexity of creating a state of the art roleplay LLM, we plan to divide the process into 3 distinct phases.

Phase 1:

  • Subnet launch with robust pipeline for roleplay LLM evaluation on public datasets and response length
  • New, evolving evaluation datasets curated by community as well as contributed by Dippy's mobile app users
  • Public model leaderboard based on evaluation criteria

Phase 2:

  • Multiple TAO themed characters introduced in the app with different personalities (funny, romantic, therapeutic etc)
  • Top models rotated among characters and evaluated in the app based on user metrics (engagement time, conversation length, retention etc)
  • Models with the highest score in each personality type are chosen as "expert" models and made publicly available

Phase 3:

  • New Mixture of Experts model made as a baseline based on the "expert" models chosen from Phase 2
  • Robust pipeline to evaluate new MOE model submissions against all the characters in the app
  • Expand the state of the art in roleplay LLMs through continuous iteration and data collection

Overview of Miner and Validator Functionality

overview

Miners would use existing frameworks, fine tuning techniques, or MergeKit, to train, fine tune, or merge models to create a unique roleplay LLM. These models would be submitted to a shared Hugging Face pool.

Validators would evaluate the and assess model performance via our protocol and rank the submissions based on various metrics (empathy, conciseness etc). We will provide a suite of testing and benchmarking protocols with state-of-the-art datasets.

Running Miners and Validators

Running a Miner

Requirements

  • Python 3.8+
  • GPU with at least 24 GB of VRAM

Setup

To start, clone the repository and cd to it:

git clone https://github.com/impel-intelligence/dippy-bittensor-subnet.git
cd dippy-bittensor-subnet
pip install -e .

Submitting a model

As a miner, you're responsible for leveraging all methods available at your disposal, including but not limited to training new models, merging existing models (we recommend MergeKit), finetuning existing models, and so on to push roleplay LLMs forward.

We outline the following criteria for Phase 1:

  • Models should be 7B-13B in size
  • We don't support quantized models at the moment...coming soon!
  • Models MUST be Safetensors Format! Check upload_models.py for how the model upload precheck works.
  • Please test the model by loading model using transformers.AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained
  • (Recommended) Test the model with arbitrary inputs, before submitting, to check for NaNs.
  • Models we are conf

Once you're happy with the performance of the model for the usecase of Roleplay, you can simply submit it to Hugging Face 🤗 and then use the following command:

python3 dippy_subnet/upload_model.py --hf_repo_id HF_REPO --wallet.name WALLET  --wallet.hotkey HOTKEY --chat_template MODEL_CHAT_TEMPLATE --model_dir PATH_TO_MODEL   

Running a Validator

Requirements

  • Python 3.9+

Setup

To start, clone the repository and cd to it:

git clone https://github.com/impel-intelligence/dippy-bittensor-subnet.git
cd dippy-bittensor-subnet
pip install -e .

To run the evaluation, simply use the following command:

python neurons/validator.py --wallet.name WALLET_NAME --wallet.hotkey WALLET_HOT_NAME

To run auto-updating validator with PM2 (recommended):

pm2 start auto_updating_validator.sh --name dippy-validator
    --netuid {netuid} \
    --wallet.name {wallet} \
    --wallet.hotkey {hotkey} \
    --axon.port {port} \
    --logging.trace

Please note that this validator will call the model validation service hosted by the dippy subnet owners. If you wish to run the model validation service locally, please follow the instructions below.

Running the model evaluation API (Optional)

Starting a validator using your local validator API requires starting validator with --use-local-validation-api flag.

Note: Validator API needs to be installed in a different venv than validator due to pydantic version conflict.

Requirements

  • Python 3.9+
  • Linux

Setup

Install Git Lfs if not installed.

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/github/git-lfs/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install git-lfs

If you are running on runpod you might also need to install 'netstat'.

apt-get install net-tools

To start, clone the repository and cd into it:

git clone https://github.com/impel-intelligence/dippy-bittensor-subnet.git
cd dippy-bittensor-subnet
python3 -m venv model_validation_venv
source model_validation_venv/bin/activate
model_validation_venv/bin/pip install -e . --no-deps
model_validation_venv/bin/pip install -r requirements_val_api.txt

Run model validation API service

cd dippy_validation_api
chmod +x start_validation_service.sh
./start_validation_service.sh

Test that it's working

python3 test_api.py

And you should see a json showing that the model status is "QUEUED" Running the same command again for sanity's sake, you should see the status of the model as "RUNNING".

Stop model validation API service

chmod +x kill_validation_api.sh
./kill_validation_api.sh

Running the validator with your own validation API service running locally

# Make a separate venv for the validator because of pydantic version conflict
python -m venv validator_venv
validator_venv/bin/pip install -e .
validator_venv/bin/python neurons/validator.py --wallet.name WALLET_NAME --wallet.hotkey WALLET_HOT_NAME --use-local-validation-api

Model Evaluation Criteria

Model Size

A smaller model will score higher than a big model. Model size is the disk space occupied by the model repo from HF. The max model size is limited to 18GB.

Latency

A faster model will score higher than a slow model.

Output Similarity

Evaluated against datasets, a model that generates similiar resposne to groundtruth will score higher.

Vibe Matching

A model that can generate outputs with similiar length to its inputs will score higher.

Acknowledgement

Our codebase is built upon Nous Research's and MyShell's Subnets.

License

The Dippy Bittensor subnet is released under the MIT License.