Rust in Model Research and Development
AbinashHi everyone, I'm Abinash. For the past few weeks, I have been working on building a neural network in Rust to test the idea of using Rust in model development and research. Rust is being extensively used in LLM infrastructure and is growing in the inference space as we get official libraries to run CUDA kernels from Rust binaries. But if you see the model design, research or development space, Rust is non-existent. So I thought I'd give it a try. I tried to build a fairly easy neural network to solve the MNIST handwritten digit identification problem. I know it's not a huge milestone. But I tried to give it a try to test my idea how easy it is to develop neural networks in Rust. The neural network I'm developing has 2 hidden layers with 512 and 128 neurons, respectively. The goal is to achieve 95% accuracy on my local CPU-only system. I got the input system right; it can now take training and testing datasets and prepare the matrices for the training and testing stages. After that, I plan to start developing a real transformer-based LLM from scratch in Rust. I'm not sure how it will play out, but I will give it a try. I'd love to have your thoughts on it. If you're a senior ML engineer or MTS at a frontier lab, I'd love to have your thoughts on it.