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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?

#31

Microsoft 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

But I feel we're going back full circle. These small models are not generalist, thus not really LLMs at least in terms of objective. Recently there has been a rise of "specialized" models that provide lots of values, but that's not why we were sold on LLMs.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#32

I simply use it to de-anonymize code that I typed in via Claude Maybe should write a plugin for it (open source): 1. Put in all your work related questions in the plugin, an LLM will make it as an abstract question for you to preview and send it 2. And then get the answer with all the data back E.g. df[“cookie_company_name”] becomes df[“a”] and back

So you are using a local small model to remove identifying information and make the question generic, which is then sent to a larger model? Is that understanding correct?

I think this would have some additional benefits of not confusing the larger model with facts it doesn't need to know about. My erasing information, you can allow its attention heads to focus on the pieces that matter.

Requires further study.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#33
post #15

We're using small language models to detect prompt injection. Not too cool, but at least we can publish some AI-related stuff on the internet without a huge bill.

What kind of prompt injection attacks do you filter out? Have you tested with a prompt tuning framework?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#34
post #2

JetBrains' 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).

You can train that size of a model on ~1 billion tokens in ~3 minutes on a rented 8xH100 80GB node (~$9/hr on Lambda Labs, RunPod io, etc.) using the NanoGPT speed run repo: https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt

For that short of a run, you'll spend more time waiting for the node to come up, downloading the dataset, and compiling the model, though.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#36
post #31

Microsoft 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

But I feel we're going back full circle. These small models are not generalist, thus not really LLMs at least in terms of objective. Recently there has been a rise of "specialized" models that provide lots of values, but that's not why we were sold on LLMs.

But that's the thing, I don't need my ML model to be able to write me a sonnet about the history of beets, especially if I want to run it at home for specific tasks like as a programming assistant.

I'm fine with and prefer specialist models in most cases.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Llama 3.2 punches way above its weight. For general "language manipulation" tasks it's good enough - and it can be used on a CPU with acceptable speed.

How many tokens/s?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#38

I have a tiny device that listens to conversations between two people or more and constantly tries to declare a "winner"

I'd love to hear more about the hardware behind this project. I've had concepts for tech requiring a mic on me at all times for various reasons. Always tricky to have enough power in a reasonable DIY form factor.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#40

I simply use it to de-anonymize code that I typed in via Claude Maybe should write a plugin for it (open source): 1. Put in all your work related questions in the plugin, an LLM will make it as an abstract question for you to preview and send it 2. And then get the answer with all the data back E.g. df[“cookie_company_name”] becomes df[“a”] and back

Are you using the model to create a key-value pair to find/replace and then reverse to reanonymize, or are you using its outputs directly? If the latter, is it fast enough and reliable enough?
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