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Small Models Have Arrived

calv.info

41–50 of 370 posts

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#41

The tokens per second speed measurement is highly inflated nowadays because most of the tokens went into thinking. I wonder if there is a more realistic measurement for "effective speed", which accounts for thinking efficiency.

Many benchmarks now measure the total cost or energy usage per completed task.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#42
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, most local models work just fine for anything you can be patient for. If I want something quicker, I will go to a SOTA model via API, but with multiple 3090s, I have never really needed a hosted model for a lot of my experiments. For code, they are great, but for creativity for NPC controllers, they leave something to be desired, but work well enough for testing, so I don't burn tokens until I'm actually playi…

"with multiple 3090s" is quite a bit of burying the lede for "most local models work just fine", don't you think?

Having multiple 6 year old cards doesn't seem like it's that big of burden for local LLMs.

I get that a lot of people don't have them. And a single one can be VERY performant. And the smaller models like a 7B can run on much smaller hardware like a mid-range [3|4|5]060.

My entire AI Dev Box cost $4500 in parts. 128GB RAM, i7-10700, 1TB and 2TB SSD, and 2x 3090s. Today's prices and inflation have definitely made that price tag seem a lot better than it was, but it was an investment in all things GPU that were happening in 2020 (crypto, blender, image gen), then LLMs exploded.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#45
post #2

> There's obviously a lot we can optimize here, but if you're charging what the WSJ or The Economist charges, you'd better be delivering similar value. Gosh, watching paint dry has been a better value than reading The Economist in the last 5 years or so. That aside, I had good results with Luna. I'd be interested in hearing about a comparison that takes into consideration response time (not TPS), cost and performance…

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Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#46

I have trouble seeing the points of using less capable models. I just want the smartest, best, and most capable models. It feels smaller models for speed and cost are just transitions towards better hardware allowing the very best model.

And that is why i always carry my groceries with an Antonov An-225 Mriya. Is it really needed? No, but i refuse to compromise on what is(was/will be) the best.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#47

I find it quite funny all these folks who are addicted to chasing frontier models, only just noticing that small models became "good enough" for most tasks. Those of us without fable-sized expense accounts noticed this quite a while back

> for most tasks

The word “most” is doing a lot of work here. On a percentage basis perhaps most tasks a typical SWE needs to do when they aren’t in meetings or writing docs are just glorified autocomplete. But that’s boring and that’s why people don’t usually talk about it.

People are addicted to chasing frontier models because they all have memories of spending a week on a deeply challenging algorithm problem or even have crazy complicated algorithms they cannot implement themselves and want to have the models achieve this technical breakthrough. It’s the kind of productivity boost from spending one week on a problem to spending one hour. In contrast the productivity boost from spending ten minutes to spending one minute just doesn’t occupy people’s mind.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#48
Small is relative. I'm looking for models that I can with run around 100 MiB mark (RAM just for the weights) to demo what you can do with this little memory.

I know of SmolLM 2 which in Q4 is borderline regarding the size and rather dated. There is also TinyStories, which is also old and also focussed on children's stories.

Is there anything newer in this category? Or should I try to distill something down to this size?

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"with multiple 3090s" is quite a bit of burying the lede for "most local models work just fine", don't you think?

Having multiple 6 year old cards doesn't seem like it's that big of burden for local LLMs. I get that a lot of people don't have them. And a single one can be VERY performant. And the smaller models like a 7B can run on much smaller hardware like a mid-range [3|4|5]060. My entire AI Dev Box cost $4500 in parts. 128GB RAM, i7-10700, 1TB and 2TB SSD, and 2x 3090s. Today's prices and inflation have definitely made that…

A single, used 3090 costs more than I have ever spent on a computer.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#50
small models + a good application layer - are more than enough, good for routine business tasks.

the application Layer i.e having a good graph RAG & connecting it up together is the missing piece for most.

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