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Small Models Have Arrived

calv.info

341–350 of 374 posts

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#341
I think technically sound its just that the frontier models are just sooo in the news that al the money is around intelligence and big breaks in intelligence.

Once the economics change and we see less bit model deployments there will be much more work optimizing models at the pareto front.

Also yes people need to be able to sustainably run these things to start running a business. Building a business on the model pricing today is as smart as building a retirement plan on a gambling schedule

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#342

Is there a resource somewhere that tells me, "Given that you have X Gb RAM on your laptop, these are the current local models you should consider trying and here's how to configure them to leave enough memory for other applications on your machine."?

Several exist actually. Try whichllm.app or fitmyllm.com.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#343

Is there a resource somewhere that tells me, "Given that you have X Gb RAM on your laptop, these are the current local models you should consider trying and here's how to configure them to leave enough memory for other applications on your machine."?

Not that I know of, but https://www.canirun.ai/ might be of use

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#344

Is there a resource somewhere that tells me, "Given that you have X Gb RAM on your laptop, these are the current local models you should consider trying and here's how to configure them to leave enough memory for other applications on your machine."?

Several exist actually. Try whichllm.app or fitmyllm.com.

> https://www.whichllm.app/

- Linux, general use case, balance - 16 GB RAM - 10 GB VRAM

Recommendation: Kimi-K3

This checks out.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone wants this to be it but over and over we discover that the bigger a model is the better it is at all tasks, even ones far outside the domain it was optimized for. IE claude fable is better at writing both code and prose than smaller code- and prose-specific models. The way vision and language models converge into the same geometric space should be extremely alarming for the "you don't need global knowledge f…

> Everyone wants this to be it but over and over we discover that the bigger a model is the better it is at all tasks, Try using a LLM model for RAG embeddings and get back to us on that.

Why do you think I haven't done this?

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#347
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bitter Lesson is very popular right now. It seems true right now. It’s having its moment right now. That doesn’t actually mean it’s axiomatically true. Commenter below gets it absolutely correct: stockfish, which runs on your 5 year old phone, is dramatically better at chess than Fable. Like, so much better that it’s not even remotely comparable. The theory of the Bitter Lesson, and it’s only a theory, is that LL…

This seems really backwards. The Bitter Lesson is all about large data-based approaches vs hand-crafted ones, it doesn't say anything about language models not trained specifically for chess. I can't find the comment you're referring to, but the latest versions of stockfish are based on neural networks trained on millions of games, so if anything the Bitter Lesson turned out true here.

Both you and the parent commenter seem to be misunderstanding the point the Bitter Lesson paper makes.

The Bitter Lesson is about general-purpose algorithms vs. specialized algorithms. Historically, chess engines were programmed to look at a chess position and use positional understanding (imparted by the human programmers) to decide what the best move is. But eventually, the chess engines that actually became stronger than humans were instead programmed to just check every possible move and countermove and see which ones lead to a win. (I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.) So even before Stockfish contained a neural network, it was considered an example of the success of the Bitter Lesson.

As it applies to AI agents, the Bitter Lesson would predict that the best possible agent would simply possess A) a way to do anything it wants, B) a way to evaluate whether what it did was correct, and C) a ton of compute. Then just turn it loose on your task. (The fact that the "brain" of the agent is an LLM is kind of irrelevant - you could also imagine the brain just being a program that generates random syntactically-correct code. What the LLM achieves is that, the random generator would take millions of years whereas the LLM is much more efficient at creating plausibly-working code. This is analogous to a chess engine's pruning heuristics.)

The hard part here is B. We've seen some great agentic successes when rewriting an existing project in a new language, since the agent can just use the project's prior test suite as its evaluator. But when developing a new project, you're still figuring out the finer details of how everything is supposed to work. As the old saying goes - writing a spec that perfectly describes how a program should work, is equivalent effort to just writing the program.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#348

We've been running a small finetuned VLM for OCR and yeah... cost is like 1/3rd of the usual vision APIs. Small models are kinda the whole product for us

Which vlm are you using? Ive found a reddit thread listing like 20 of them, but its hard to find any concrete info on what is worth even tryin.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#349

Is there a resource somewhere that tells me, "Given that you have X Gb RAM on your laptop, these are the current local models you should consider trying and here's how to configure them to leave enough memory for other applications on your machine."?

I just asked my current LLM for that advice. Funny that they dont block it, I guess they are not very threatened.

For my anemic 6GB built-on 14GB Qwen seems to be the best bet, not great reviews but from my limited testing its pretty impressive.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#350

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…

I have trouble getting simple extraction to work sometimes. I have a block of text describing people and their roles at a company and their ages, and i asked for structured results of an array of these things with the text span that it appears in and all i can say is: nope.

I've done pretty decent local prose->json extraction using Qwen and Phi and Gemma.

I'm sure most of it comes down to prompts, and all of them run over 100tps on a 3090. Smaller cards will likely be slower, but Qwen3.5 9B is small enough to fit on most consumer cards.

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