12/25/2023: Nous Hermes 2 Yi 34B for Christmas

**Teknium** released **Nous Hermes 2** on **Yi 34B**, positioning it as a top open model compared to **Mixtral**, **DeepSeek**, and **Qwen**. **Apple** introduced **Ferret**, a new open-source multimodal LLM. Discussions in the **Nous Research AI Discord** focused on **AI model optimization** and **quantization** techniques like **AWQ**, **GPTQ**, and **AutoAWQ**, with insights on proprietary optimization and throughput metrics. Additional highlights include the addition of **NucleusX Model** to **transformers**, a **30B model with 80 MMLU**, and the **YAYI 2** language model by **Wenge Technology** trained on **2.65 trillion tokens**. *"AutoAWQ outperforms vLLM up to batch size 8"* was noted, and proprietary parallel decoding and tensor parallelization across GPUs were discussed for speed improvements.