Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you recommend a tiny language model I could try out locally?
Llama 3.2 has about 3.2b parameters. I have to admit, I use bigger ones like phi-4 (14.7b) and Llama 3.3 (70.6b) but I think Llama 3.2 could do de-anonimization and anonimization of code
Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#22The local models do things ranging from cleaning up OCR, to summarizing meetings, to estimating the user's current goals and activity, to predicting search terms, to predicting queries and actions that, if run, would help the user accomplish their current task.
The capabilities of these tiny models have really surged recently. Even small vision models are becoming useful, especially if fine tuned.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#23Microsoft published a paper on their FLAME model (60M parameters) for Excel formula repair/completion which outperformed much larger models (>100B parameters). https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13779
Edit: No, the retrieval is Formula-Formula, the model (nor I believe tokenizer) does not handle English.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#24No, but I use llama 3.2 1b and qwen2.5 1.5 as bash oneliner generator, always runnimg in console.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#25JetBrains' local single-line autocomplete model is 0.1B (w/ 1536-token context, ~170 lines of code): https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2024/04/04/full-line-code-co... For context, GPT-2-small is 0.124B params (w/ 1024-token context).
That size is on the edge of something you can train at home
I’ve seen a number of “DIY GPT-2” tutorials that target this sweet spot. You won’t get amazing results unless you want to leave a personal computer running for a number of hours/days and you have solid data to train on locally, but fine-tuning should be in the realm of normal hobbyists patience.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#26I have a mini PC with an n100 CPU connected to a small 7" monitor sitting on my desk, under the regular PC. I have llama 3b (q4) generating endless stories in different genres and styles. It's fun to glance over at it and read whatever it's in the middle of making. I gave llama.cpp one CPU core and it generates slow enough to just read at a normal pace, and the CPU fans don't go nuts. Totally not productive or really…
Do you find that it actually generates varied and diverse stories? Or does it just fall into the same 3 grooves? Last week I tried to get an LLM (one of the recent Llama models running through Groq, it was 70B I believe) to produce randomly generated prompts in a variety of styles and it kept producing cyberpunk scifi stuff. When I told it to stop doing cyberpunk scifi stuff it went completely to wild west.
That said, this is also not helped by the fact that all of the default interfaces lack many essential features, so you have to build the interface yourself. Neither "clear the context on every attempt" nor "reuse the context repeatedly" will give good results, but having one context producing just one-line summaries, then fresh contexts expanding each one will do slightly less badly.
(If you actually want the LLM to do something useful, there are many more things that need to be added beyond this)
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#27Pretty sure they are mostly used as fine tuning targets, rather than as-is.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#28A more difficult problem we forsee is to turn it into a real-time (online) firewall (for calls, for example).
[1] https://chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/d5aeeda1-fefe-4fc6-8c90-2...
[1] MediaPipe in particular makes it simple to prototype around Gemma2 on Android: https://ai.google.dev/edge/mediapipe/solutions/genai/llm_inf...
[2] Intend to open source it once we get it working for anything other than SMSes
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#291. Create several different personas
2. Generate a ton of variation using a high temperature
3. Compare the variagtions head-to-head using the LLM to get a win / loss ratio
The best ones can be quite good.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
That size is on the edge of something you can train at home
If you have modern hardware, you can absolutely train that at home. Or very affordable on a cloud service. I’ve seen a number of “DIY GPT-2” tutorials that target this sweet spot. You won’t get amazing results unless you want to leave a personal computer running for a number of hours/days and you have solid data to train on locally, but fine-tuning should be in the realm of normal hobbyists patience.
* I don't mind compiling it myself but i'd rather not write it.