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Small Models Have Arrived

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Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was replying to this: The conclusion of the bitter lesson would be that a large language model trained on chess commentary as well as being trained on millions of chess games would outperform stockfish which is only trained on millions of chess games. If you can draw any lessons from chess commentary, I think it’s very reasonable to call it “hand-crafted heuristics.”

Hand-crafted even if you're feeding in the raw commentary? That seems like a weird way to consider it. Wouldn't that make LLMs in general "hand-crafted"? And raw games plus raw commentary is all the data you have. You can make more games but those can be fed to both stockfish and the LLM competitor. So it seems like a valid interpretation of the bitter lesson to me.

Yeah, "hand-crafted" is a bit of a stretch; I mean their value is in the human insight they contain.

The key point I was trying to get at is that the human insights don't contain anything that can't be mined from vast amounts of gameplay. Every human insight can eventually be rediscovered and made rigorous by data (in chess, at least!) In the short term, those insights are useful, but in the longer term, they add nothing at all.

Note also that "raw gameplay" here can mean new games -- you can generate as much data as you need, you don't need to rely on real recorded games.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#372

> Across his various startups, Peter has seen two kinds of work: > 1. the "IQ 180" work. some mad scientist genius type comes up with some crazy solution you've never thought of. > 2. the "token spewer" work. being ultra responsive, pushing the ball forward across dozens of different fronts. Interesting comp to pg's Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html I'm curious about…

I conceive of this as Protoss vs Zerg. I’ve had a lot of success in my career following a Zerg strategy.

That's been my goal too, know a bit of everything - enough to know it exists and maybe Know A Guy I can ask if I need to know something more specific.

Now in many cases the "Guy" is an LLM. I know enough to know when the LLM is bullshitting me and when I need to consult an actual human.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hand-crafted even if you're feeding in the raw commentary? That seems like a weird way to consider it. Wouldn't that make LLMs in general "hand-crafted"? And raw games plus raw commentary is all the data you have. You can make more games but those can be fed to both stockfish and the LLM competitor. So it seems like a valid interpretation of the bitter lesson to me.

Yeah, "hand-crafted" is a bit of a stretch; I mean their value is in the human insight they contain. The key point I was trying to get at is that the human insights don't contain anything that can't be mined from vast amounts of gameplay. Every human insight can eventually be rediscovered and made rigorous by data (in chess, at least!) In the short term, those insights are useful, but in the longer term, they add not…

> Every human insight can eventually be rediscovered and made rigorous by data (in chess, at least!) In the short term, those insights are useful, but in the longer term, they add nothing at all.

But isn't that the bulk of what we're shoving into LLMs, and it makes them much smarter? If it's useful there but not in a chess AI then that seems like a significant crack in the bitter lesson.

> Note also that "raw gameplay" here can mean new games -- you can generate as much data as you need, you don't need to rely on real recorded games.

Yeah I mentioned that, generated games are useful. But if we're being fair and letting both AIs use generated game data, does the more general LLM ever actually overtake the specialized stockfish like the bitter lesson suggests?

Another way to look at this is that giving the LLM the commentary is a way to avoid complaints of hiding data from the LLM, since it'll have strictly more info than stockfish. But if we cut that from the training data and only give it a basic description of chess and lots of raw game data then it's going to get even worse than it already is at chess. Meanwhile stockfish never had that commentary, just actual hand-crafted heuristics and training on game data, and it's very strong.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#374
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean - how specifically are you using knowledge graphs?

there's this [0] - Zep.

e.g for a lot of small business - they generate invoices - feed that into a RAG system. Then have an agent etc do follow ups. for agents then the smaller models are enough.

[0]: https://help.getzep.com/graphiti/getting-started/overview

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