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Small Models Have Arrived

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Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#101
post #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.

Can you elaborate on this?

The model doesn't have to be smart if all it's doing is pushing a few different buttons.

I don't have to be an automotive engineer to start my car and put it in drive.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea has failed to pan out time and time again - people have an instinct that hand-crafted finely-tuned specialized AI systems must be optimal, but throwing more scale and compute to something more generally smart always wins out. It's especially palpable just looking at the last few years of LLM's: a frontier model with all the world knowledge you can stuff in it and every tool at its disposal has always perfor…

This idea has not failed to pan out at all. I work for a startup that is exactly what GP described, and am set for life because of how wildly successful it is. Notably, we are successful, in a genuine sense of the word: we bootstrapped from running tiny models to larger and larger models on our own slowly improving fleet of GPUs, and now have millions in revenue without a single dime of outside investment. Conversely…

Wait, you actually found a viable counter to The Bitter Lesson? Please say more

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#103

> But I also think the demand for "fast/cheap/good-enough" models is just about to take off. There's a sort of "revelation" I had in ~early '24 when I used a 7B local model with a library called Guidance (initially out of MS, then the team moved) to create a flow where the model would receive pseudocode for tests, first write the tests, and once I approved then started writing code until the tests passed. This was be…

Yes. The infancy phase of this technology is represented by the pursuit of making wildly grand, wildly expensive, all-purpose models that somehow discern a user's full accurate intent from a lazy, underdeveloped, vague idea that they ambiguously and poorly express in a couple dozen words. The adolescence will arrive as those outsized and ill-considered ambitions collapse and we instead see a cambrian explosion of res…

Someone will eventually figure out how to package it all into a single, cheap chip

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#104
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, the tunnel vision around local models on this site is crazy. The percentage of people in the world who can afford the hardware is extremely low.

It's a decreasing pool as well I'd say, the dev machine I built last summer would make less financial sense to me now for example.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#106

> But I also think the demand for "fast/cheap/good-enough" models is just about to take off. There's a sort of "revelation" I had in ~early '24 when I used a 7B local model with a library called Guidance (initially out of MS, then the team moved) to create a flow where the model would receive pseudocode for tests, first write the tests, and once I approved then started writing code until the tests passed. This was be…

BTW structured/constrained generation has so many places to trivially enable jailbreaking/alignment/safety problems that closed source models heavily limit the full expresivity of grammars and capabilities, particular of on-the-fly dynamic grammar construction/reconstruction.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea has not failed to pan out at all. I work for a startup that is exactly what GP described, and am set for life because of how wildly successful it is. Notably, we are successful, in a genuine sense of the word: we bootstrapped from running tiny models to larger and larger models on our own slowly improving fleet of GPUs, and now have millions in revenue without a single dime of outside investment. Conversely…

Wait, you actually found a viable counter to The Bitter Lesson? Please say more

This is a misunderstanding of either the bitter lesson or what was being claimed, on multiple accounts. Firstly, the bitter lesson is merely about human expertise-tuned algorithms vs. throwing raw compute at a domain. But, notably, it is still domain-specific. No matter how much compute you throw at training an LLM, it is never going to beat a Chess engine at Chess. If you give a Chess engine 1,000,000 compute units and a general-purpose LLM 1,000,000 compute units, the Chess engine is obviously superior at Chess; ergo, there is value in throwing compute units into training models for specific tasks. This is true for within several orders of magnitude of compute, in fact. It's also true that if you give the Chess engine 1000 compute units it'll still beat the all-purpose model with 1,000,000 units, so actually there's a lot of value in training for specific tasks.

Secondly, the bitter lesson is predicated on compute being cheap. There was a period where a hand-tuned algorithm informed by human expertise would outperform a raw alpha-beta search at Chess. Then compute got cheaper, and DeepBlue ascended to the top. Compute is now expensive again relative to the tasks being performed. We are absolutely still in a period where human expertise in training LLMs will outperform a naive approach with more raw compute.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea has not failed to pan out at all. I work for a startup that is exactly what GP described, and am set for life because of how wildly successful it is. Notably, we are successful, in a genuine sense of the word: we bootstrapped from running tiny models to larger and larger models on our own slowly improving fleet of GPUs, and now have millions in revenue without a single dime of outside investment. Conversely…

Wait, you actually found a viable counter to The Bitter Lesson? Please say more

Perhaps an analogy to Moore's law?

Bitter lesson #1: don't waste time optimizing code when a faster processor is around the corner.

What countered it: Moore's law stopped working.

Bitter lesson #2 similarly relies on scaling laws that might have diminishing returns wrt model runtime vs intelligence. Runtime matters for turnaround on the problem you're solving.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#109
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2x 3090s You could sell those and have enough money to pay for hosted inference for years.

They cost more to run than hosted anyway. But that isn't the point of having them. They are a playground, a backup when the internet is down, or claude is down. They can render Blender scenes pretty well. They play any game I want. You can do each of those at various hosts and own nothing. Or own a couple "over priced" cards and do it all at home on battery power for a few hours while the power is out.

For me it’s more that you can show them your financial and medical data without BigCo looking over your shoulder.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#110
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the tunnel vision around local models on this site is crazy. The percentage of people in the world who can afford the hardware is extremely low.

It seems roughly similar to the pricing level of personal computers in the early eighties (i.e. IBM PC and Apple Macintosh). I’d expect prices to come down significantly over the next few years. Not so much in the next year or two, but after that.

Just like for warships, the complexity and cost of building cutting edge hardware has grown exponentially up to a point where a significant chunk of the world's computing is dependent on 2 companies: ASML, TSMC. We shouldn't extrapolate linearly from examples from the 80s.
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