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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

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BigCos you are referring to are earning their money doing state of the art research, not so much from your financial and medical data. That was the age of Internet ads, which was over since AdBlock was created for anyone concerned.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#376
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're just observing ppl in one of these rare instances where enough of them come together because they are motivated. 'Toxic' is the clamoring sound of a crowded room where what gets through to your ears are just the most annoying snippets of incomplete conversations. I dare you to hang out with any actual people here, understand their viewpoint and listen to what they actually have to say in person, within…

The "toxicity" was: - ingesting all the current knowledge without regard for intellectual property or the work of people that went into it; then - claiming that AI would make all those people who put in the work redundant It's not really surprising that when the sales pitch is "this will eliminate human creative work in all writing and illustration centric industries", people got angry.

These are great examples of converting the snippets into imaginary ppl. Thanks.

Re: Small Models Have Arrived

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small model, yes! But not necessarily a good model. With the additional caveat that I don't know whether that specific card is supported by modern drivers. You'd be looking at one in the 6B or 7B parameters range at FP8. Or smaller. It's been quite some time since a recognizable company in the AI space released a model that small. You can try larger model that has been quantized down to that size, but they don't al…

You're arguing for a very specific range of weights but many slightly smaller and slightly larger models have been released including QAT and MoE versions. An old nVidia brand card with 8GB is more than enough to see those models running at usable speeds and accuracy.

I wasn't arguing for or against anything, just trying to help answer the person's question.
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