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How large are large language models?

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Re: How large are large language models?

#31
post #29

If you want it visually, here's a chart of total parameters as a function of year: https://app.charts.quesma.com/s/rmyk38

This is really awesome. Thank you for creating that. I included a screenshot and link to the chart with credit to you in a comment to my post.

Re: How large are large language models?

#32
post #16

Deepseek v1 is ~670Bn which is ~1.4TB physical. All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB. The public web is ~50TB. I think a usable zip of all english electronic text publicly available would be on O(100TB). So we're at about 1% of that in model size, and we're in a diminishing-returns area of training -- ie., going to >1% has not yielded improvements (cf. gpt4.5 vs 4o). This is why compute spend…

Simply add images and video, and these estimates start to sound like the "640 KB should be enough for everyone". After that, make the robots explore and interact with the world by themselves, to fetch even more data. In all seriousness, adding image and interaction data will probably be enormously useful, even for generating text.

Like both will be done. Idk what the roi is on adding video data to the text models, but it's presumably lower than text.

There are just a lot of avenues to try at this point.

Re: How large are large language models?

#33

Deepseek v1 is ~670Bn which is ~1.4TB physical. All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB. The public web is ~50TB. I think a usable zip of all english electronic text publicly available would be on O(100TB). So we're at about 1% of that in model size, and we're in a diminishing-returns area of training -- ie., going to >1% has not yielded improvements (cf. gpt4.5 vs 4o). This is why compute spend…

> All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB. The public web is ~50TB. I think a usable zip of all english electronic text publicly available would be on O(100TB). Where you getting these numbers from? Interested to see how that's calculated. I read somewhere, but cannot find the source anymore, that all written text prior to this century was approx 50MB. (Might be misquoted as don't have source an…

I reckon a prolific writer could publish a million words in their career.

Most people who blog could wrote 1k words a day. That's a million in 3 years. So not crazy numbers here.

That's 5Mb. Maybe you meant 50Gb. I'd hazard 50Tb.

Re: How large are large language models?

#34
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

How big is Wikipedia text? Within 3X that size with 100% accuracy

Re: How large are large language models?

#35
post #29

If you want it visually, here's a chart of total parameters as a function of year: https://app.charts.quesma.com/s/rmyk38

I think that one thing that this chart makes visually very clear is the point I about GPT-3 being such a huge leap, and there being a long gap before anybody was able to match it.

Re: How large are large language models?

#36
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

It's extremely interesting how powerful a language model is at compression.

When you train it to be an assistant model, it's better at compressing assistant transcripts than it is general text.

There is an eval which I have a lot of interested in and respect for https://huggingface.co/spaces/Jellyfish042/UncheatableEval called UncheatableEval, which tests how good of a language model an LLM is by applying it on a range of compression tasks.

This task is essentially impossible to 'cheat'. Compression is a benchmark you cannot game!

Re: How large are large language models?

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB. The public web is ~50TB. I think a usable zip of all english electronic text publicly available would be on O(100TB). Where you getting these numbers from? Interested to see how that's calculated. I read somewhere, but cannot find the source anymore, that all written text prior to this century was approx 50MB. (Might be misquoted as don't have source an…

Maybe prior to the prior century, and even then I smell a lot of bullshit. I mean, just look at the Project Gutenberg. Even plaintext only, even compressed.

Even Shakespeare alone needs 4 floppy disks.

Re: How large are large language models?

#38
> There were projects to try to match it, but generally they operated by fine tuning things like small (70B) llama models on a bunch of GPT-3 generated texts (synthetic data - which can result in degeneration when AI outputs are fed back into AI training inputs).

That parenthetical doesn't quite work for me.

If synthetic data always degraded performance, AI labs wouldn't use synthetic data. They use it because it helps them train better models.

There's a paper that shows that if you very deliberately train a model in its own output in a loop you can get worse performance. That's not what AI labs using synthetic data actually do.

That paper gets a lot of attention because the schadenfreude of models destroying themselves through eating their own tails is irresistible.

Re: How large are large language models?

#39

Deepseek v1 is ~670Bn which is ~1.4TB physical. All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB. The public web is ~50TB. I think a usable zip of all english electronic text publicly available would be on O(100TB). So we're at about 1% of that in model size, and we're in a diminishing-returns area of training -- ie., going to >1% has not yielded improvements (cf. gpt4.5 vs 4o). This is why compute spend…

This is kind of related to the jack morris post https://blog.jxmo.io/p/there-are-no-new-ideas-in-ai-only he discusses how the big leaps in LLMs have mostly come - not so much from new training methods or arch. changes as such - but the ability of new archs. to ingest more data.

Re: How large are large language models?

#40

Deepseek v1 is ~670Bn which is ~1.4TB physical. All digitized books ever written/encoded compress to a few TB. The public web is ~50TB. I think a usable zip of all english electronic text publicly available would be on O(100TB). So we're at about 1% of that in model size, and we're in a diminishing-returns area of training -- ie., going to >1% has not yielded improvements (cf. gpt4.5 vs 4o). This is why compute spend…

>The public web is ~50TB Did you mean to type EB?

Only if you included all images and video
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