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In a groundbreaking announcement, Liquid AI, an MIT spin-off, has introduced its first series of Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs). These models, designed from first principles, set a new benchmark in the generative AI space, offering unmatched performance across various scales. LFMs, with their innovative architecture and advanced capabilities, are poised to challenge industry-leading AI models, including ChatGPT.
Liquid AI was founded by a team of MIT researchers, including Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, Alexander Amini, and Daniela Rus. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the company’s mission is to create capable and efficient general-purpose AI systems for enterprises of all sizes. The team originally pioneered liquid neural networks, a class of AI models inspired by brain dynamics, and now aims to expand the capabilities of AI systems at every scale, from edge devices to enterprise-grade deployments.
What Are Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs)?
Liquid Foundation Models represent a new generation of AI systems that are highly efficient in both memory usage and computational power. Built with a foundation in dynamical systems, signal processing, and numerical linear algebra, these models are designed to handle various types of sequential data—such as text, video, audio, and signals—with remarkable accuracy.
Liquid AI has developed three primary language models as part of this launch:
- LFM-1B: A dense model with 1.3 billion parameters, optimized for resource-constrained environments.
- LFM-3B: A 3.1 billion-parameter model, ideal for edge deployment scenarios, such as mobile applications.
- LFM-40B: A 40.3 billion-parameter Mixture of Experts (MoE) model designed to handle complex tasks with exceptional performance.
These models have already demonstrated state-of-the-art results across key AI benchmarks, making them a formidable competitor to existing generative AI models.
State-of-the-Art Performance
Liquid AI’s LFMs deliver best-in-class performance across various benchmarks. For example, LFM-1B outperforms transformer-based models in its size category, while LFM-3B competes with larger models like Microsoft’s Phi-3.5 and Meta’s Llama series. The LFM-40B model, despite its size, is efficient enough to rival models with even larger parameter counts, offering a unique balance between performance and resource efficiency.
Some highlights of LFM performance include:
- LFM-1B: Dominates benchmarks such as MMLU and ARC-C, setting a new standard for 1B-parameter models.
- LFM-3B: Surpasses models like Phi-3.5 and Google’s Gemma 2 in efficiency, while maintaining a small memory footprint, making it ideal for mobile and edge AI applications.
- LFM-40B: The MoE architecture of this model offers comparable performance to larger models, with 12 billion active parameters at any given time.
A New Era in AI Efficiency
A significant challenge in modern AI is managing memory and computation, particularly when working with long-context tasks like document summarization or chatbot interactions. LFMs excel in this area by efficiently compressing input data, resulting in reduced memory consumption during inference. This allows the models to process longer sequences without requiring expensive hardware upgrades.
For example, LFM-3B offers a 32k token context length—making it one of the most efficient models for tasks requiring large amounts of data to be processed simultaneously.
A Revolutionary Architecture
LFMs are built on a unique architectural framework, deviating from traditional transformer models. The architecture is centered around adaptive linear operators, which modulate computation based on the input data. This approach allows Liquid AI to significantly optimize performance across various hardware platforms, including NVIDIA, AMD, Cerebras, and Apple hardware.
The design space for LFMs involves a novel blend of token-mixing and channel-mixing structures that improve how the model processes data. This leads to superior generalization and reasoning capabilities, particularly in long-context tasks and multimodal applications.
Expanding the AI Frontier
Liquid AI has grand ambitions for LFMs. Beyond language models, the company is working on expanding its foundation models to support various data modalities, including video, audio, and time series data. These advancements will enable LFMs to scale across multiple industries, such as financial services, biotechnology, and consumer electronics.
The company is also focused on contributing to the open science community. While the models themselves are not open-sourced at this time, Liquid AI plans to release relevant research findings, methods, and data sets to the broader AI community, encouraging collaboration and innovation.
Early Access and Adoption
Liquid AI is currently offering early access to its LFMs through various platforms, including Liquid Playground, Lambda (Chat UI and API), and Perplexity Labs. Enterprises looking to integrate cutting-edge AI systems into their operations can explore the potential of LFMs across different deployment environments, from edge devices to on-premise solutions.
Liquid AI’s open-science approach encourages early adopters to share their experiences and insights. The company is actively seeking feedback to refine and optimize its models for real-world applications. Developers and organizations interested in becoming part of this journey can contribute to red-teaming efforts and help Liquid AI improve its AI systems.
Conclusion
The release of Liquid Foundation Models marks a significant advancement in the AI landscape. With a focus on efficiency, adaptability, and performance, LFMs stand poised to reshape the way enterprises approach AI integration. As more organizations adopt these models, Liquid AI’s vision of scalable, general-purpose AI systems will likely become a cornerstone of the next era of artificial intelligence.
If you’re interested in exploring the potential of LFMs for your organization, Liquid AI invites you to get in touch and join the growing community of early adopters shaping the future of AI.
For more information, visit Liquid AI’s official website and start experimenting with LFMs today.
