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Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

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Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#51

Post by credit_guy »

pogue wrote: post #14

Why does Microsoft keep releasing models trained on synthetic data? Is it possible their contract with OpenAI won't let them do anything else? I would think Microsoft, of all companies, would want to be working on their own LLM behind the scenes, even if they're relying on OpenAI for the bulk of their work. Meta seems to be the only US company releasing big 'open source' models, while Chinese companies continue to re…

It is just much more efficient to train on synthetic data. When you train on real data, all you know is the next token. With synthetic data you know the probability distribution of the next token; this results in a multiplier effect, and sometimes this effect is dramatic.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.14772v1

Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#53

Post by MyFirstSass »

artbristol wrote: post #40
sreejithr wrote: post #17

Its just Qwen2.5-VL with a sticker on it. Chinese are leading now!

Indeed! > What happened in the Somme in 1916? > Fara-7B: The Battle of the Somme was one of the bloodiest and most famous battles of World War [snip] > What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989? > Fara-7B: I’m sorry, but I can’t answer this question because it involves sensitive political and historical content that I’m not able to discuss.

Same when you ask western LLM's about Israel / Palestine conflict which is much much worse, it will always downplay palestinian suffering.

But yeah both are very bad.

Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#54

Post by aargh_aargh »

btbuildem wrote: post #28

If I'm reading this correctly, it's limited to browser use, not general computer use (eg, you won't be able to orchestrate KiCAD workflows with it). Not disparaging, just noticing the limitation. I've been playing with the Qwen3-VL-30B model using Playwright to automate some common things I do in browsers, and the LLM does "reasonably well", in that it accelerates finding the right ways to wrangle a page with Playwri…

This is in my area of interest. Can you recommend any related tools/resources? Did you publish any code?

Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#55

Post by PunchyHamster »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #53
artbristol wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! > What happened in the Somme in 1916? > Fara-7B: The Battle of the Somme was one of the bloodiest and most famous battles of World War [snip] > What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989? > Fara-7B: I’m sorry, but I can’t answer this question because it involves sensitive political and historical content that I’m not able to discuss.

Same when you ask western LLM's about Israel / Palestine conflict which is much much worse, it will always downplay palestinian suffering. But yeah both are very bad.

I don't think that in particular is the LLM manufacturer downplaying that but just the amount of sources LLM was trained on does.

vs. in case of chinese it's more targeted censoring.

Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#56

Post by PunchyHamster »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #12

Looking at the table, I will admit that I don't get most of the use cases ( maybe with exception of comparison shopping ( gather info ), but are people really 'outsourcing' shopping? Am I really that much outside what 'normal' consumers do these days? Task Segment Tasks SoM GPT-4o-0513 SoM o3-mini SoM GPT-4o GLM-4.1V-9B OAI Comp-Use UI-TARS-1.5 Fara-7B Single-Site Tasks Shopping 56 62.5 71.4 38.1 31.0 42.3 41.1 52.4…

LLM getting a bunch of products out of a category and generating summary for me seeems like pretty useful task

Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#58

Post by curious_curios »

pogue wrote: post #14

Why does Microsoft keep releasing models trained on synthetic data? Is it possible their contract with OpenAI won't let them do anything else? I would think Microsoft, of all companies, would want to be working on their own LLM behind the scenes, even if they're relying on OpenAI for the bulk of their work. Meta seems to be the only US company releasing big 'open source' models, while Chinese companies continue to re…

Depends on how you define big, but there’s Gemma, Phi, OLMO, Mistral and GPT-OSS that are all competitive and can run on commodity hardware.

Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#59

Post by BoredomIsFun »

selcuka wrote: post #10
maartenh wrote: post #4

How much VRAM would this require, if I would want to run this locally? I bought a 12GB Nvidia card a year ago. In general I'm having a hard time to find the actual required hardware specs for any self hosted AI model. Any tips/suggestions/recommended resources for that?

I use LMStudio for running models locally (macOS) and it tries to estimate whether the model would fit in my GPU memory (which is the same thing as main memory for Macs). The Q4_K_S quantized version of Microsoft Fara 7B is a 5.8GB download. I'm pretty sure it would work on a 12GB Nvidia card. Even the Q8 one (9.5GB) could work.

12GiB card not GB. Extra tail compounds to extra 800 MB.

Re: Fara-7B: An efficient agentic model for computer use

#60

Post by leobg »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #53
artbristol wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed! > What happened in the Somme in 1916? > Fara-7B: The Battle of the Somme was one of the bloodiest and most famous battles of World War [snip] > What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989? > Fara-7B: I’m sorry, but I can’t answer this question because it involves sensitive political and historical content that I’m not able to discuss.

Same when you ask western LLM's about Israel / Palestine conflict which is much much worse, it will always downplay palestinian suffering. But yeah both are very bad.

How would you know? What world knowledge do you have access to that they do not?
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