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Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

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101–110 of 255 posts

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#101
>Experiments at Cactus showed that MLPs can be completely dropped from transformer networks, as long as the model relies on external knowledge source.

Heh, what a coincidence, just today one of my students presented research results which also confirmed this. He removed MLP from Qwen and the model still could do transformation tasks on input but lost knowledge.

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is for building agentic capabilities into very small devices like phones, glasses, watches and more. Does that make sense?

[flagged]

Throwing a few things out - HN has changed over the years, but people make stuff to make stuff. There don't need to be product use cases. The tone of the comment goes against the spirit of HN - likely the reason for downvotes.

That aside- a very small model that takes text and outputs structured json according to a spec is nice. It let's you turn natural language into a user action. For example, command palettes could benefit from this.

If you can do a tiny bit of planning (todo) and chain actions, it seems reasonable that you could traverse a rich state space to achieve some goal on behalf of a user.

Games could use something like it for free form dialog while stool enforcing predefined narrative graphs etc.

I'm sure you could come up with more. It's a fuzzy function.

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#104
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon me, do I know you? Why are you attacking me?

I don't think they're attacking you, but suggesting you read more carefully. The information provided is correct and clear, but you need to let go of your own biases when consuming it. I personally prefer the M to the B. I guess as an engineer, noticing the units comes pretty naturally.

25-35 Billion is expected these days, there's many models of this size, it's very common. (Gemma 4 31B, Qwen 3.6 25B & 35B, JT 35B, EXAONE 35B, Nemotron 30B, GLM 4.7-flash 30B, Servam 30B, LFM2 24B, Granite 4.1 30B...)

Announcing something that's 1/1000th is significant and remarkable! Hiding it in a single letter is burying the lede.

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Throwing a few things out - HN has changed over the years, but people make stuff to make stuff. There don't need to be product use cases. The tone of the comment goes against the spirit of HN - likely the reason for downvotes. That aside- a very small model that takes text and outputs structured json according to a spec is nice. It let's you turn natural language into a user action. For example, command palettes coul…

> people make stuff to make stuff. There don't need to be product use cases.

OK. Great! So it doesn't need to be a commercial product. But does it do something (anything?) interesting? I'm interested in your games example, I'd love to see it done in real life. IIUC, game AIs are actually much more constrained and predictable for play-ability reasons. If you let it go all free form a plurality of players have a "WTF??!?" experience which is super Not Good.

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#107
post #100

No FFN is blowing my mind. This is pretty much "Attention Is ACTUALLY All You Need". Reminds me of BERT Q&A which would return indices into the input context, but even that had a FFN. Really exciting work.

I guess this had always been bugging me. I get while you need activation/non-linearities, but do you really need the FFN in Transformers? People say that without it you can't do "knowledge/fact" lookups, but you still have the Value part of the attention, and if your question is "what is the capital of france" the LLM could presumably extract out "paris" from the value vector during attention computation instead of needing the FFN for that. Deleting the FFN is probably way worse in terms of scaling laws or storing information, but is it an actual architectural dead-end (in the way that deleting activation layer clearly would be since it'd collapse everythig to a linear function).

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#108
post #69

That M versus B is way too subtle. 0.026B is my suggestion

[flagged]

Can you please make your substantive points without sharp elbows? We're trying for something different here, and would appreciate it if you'd post in the intended spirit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#109

That M versus B is way too subtle. 0.026B is my suggestion

I was so confused by many comments in this post but thanks to you I realized that some people are apparently reading it as 26B and that's why their comments make no sense.

Re: Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing a few things out - HN has changed over the years, but people make stuff to make stuff. There don't need to be product use cases. The tone of the comment goes against the spirit of HN - likely the reason for downvotes. That aside- a very small model that takes text and outputs structured json according to a spec is nice. It let's you turn natural language into a user action. For example, command palettes coul…

> people make stuff to make stuff. There don't need to be product use cases. OK. Great! So it doesn't need to be a commercial product. But does it do something (anything?) interesting ? I'm interested in your games example, I'd love to see it done in real life. IIUC, game AIs are actually much more constrained and predictable for play-ability reasons. If you let it go all free form a plurality of players have a "WTF?…

It doesn't have to do any thing interesting - it's completely fascinating all on it's own. If you understand anything about the math and science behind LLMs, you'll understand that this is an achievement worthy of sharing to a community like HN.

That being said, small models like these have plenty of use cases. They allow for extra "slack" to be introduced into a programmatic workflow in a compute constrained environment. Something like this could help enable the "ever present" phone assistant, without scraping all your personal data and sending it off to Google/OpenAI/etc. Imagine if keywords in a chat would then trigger searches on your local data to bring up relevant notes/emails/documents into a cache, and then this cache directly powers your autocomplete (or just a sidebar that pops up with the most relevant information). Having flexible function calling in that loop is key for fault tolerance and adaptability to new content and contexts.

Its cool. Enjoy it.

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