Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques are widely used today to retrieve and present information in a conversational format. This paper presents a set of enhancements to traditional RAG techniques, focusing on large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned and hosted on AWS Trainium and Inferentia2 AI chips via SageMaker. These chips are characterized by their elasticity, affordability, and efficient performance for AI compute tasks. Besides enabling deployment on these chips, this work aims to improve tool usage, add citation capabilities, and mitigate the risks of hallucinations and unsafe responses due to context bias. We benchmark our RAG system's performance on the Natural Questions and HotPotQA datasets, achieving an accuracy of 62% and 59% respectively, exceeding other models such as DBRX and Mixtral Instruct.

Getting large language models (LLMs) to perform well on the downstream tasks requires pre-training over trillions of tokens. This typically demands a large number of powerful computational devices in addition to a stable distributed training framework to accelerate the training. The growing number of applications leveraging AI/ML had led to a scarcity of the expensive conventional accelerators (such as GPUs), which begs the need for the alternative specialized-accelerators that are scalable and cost-efficient. AWS Trainium is the second-generation machine learning accelerator that has been purposely built for training large deep learning models. Its corresponding instance, Amazon EC2 trn1, is an alternative to GPU instances for LLM training. However, training LLMs with billions of parameters on trn1 is challenging due to its relatively nascent software ecosystem. In this paper, we showcase HLAT: a 7 billion parameter decoder-only LLM pre-trained using trn1 instances over 1.8 trillion tokens. The performance of HLAT is benchmarked against popular open source baseline models including LLaMA and OpenLLaMA, which have been trained on NVIDIA GPUs and Google TPUs, respectively. On various evaluation tasks, we show that HLAT achieves model quality on par with the baselines. We also share the best practice of using the Neuron Distributed Training Library (NDTL), a customized distributed training library for AWS Trainium to achieve efficient training. Our work demonstrates that AWS Trainium powered by the NDTL is able to successfully pre-train state-of-the-art LLM models with high performance and cost-effectiveness.