Running out of system memory (RAM) when loading a large language model like AutoModelForCausalLM
is common, especially with large models such as LLaMA, Falcon, or GPT-NeoX. Here's why it happens and how to fix or mitigate it.
- Model Size in RAM:
- Large models (e.g., 7B, 13B, 70B parameters) can take tens of gigabytes of RAM just to load in full precision (FP32).
- Even a 7B model can use ~14–28 GB of RAM depending on precision and overhead.
- If your system has limited RAM (e.g., 16 GB), this can cause crashes.