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How large are large language models?

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Re: How large are large language models?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind that I can ask for 50 synonyms, instantly get a great list with great meaning summaries. Then ask for the same list sorted and get that nearly instantly, These models have a short time context for now, but they already have a huge “working memory” relative to us . It is very cool. And indicative that vastly smarter models are going to be achieved fairly easily, with new insight. Our biology has had t…

> These models [...] have a huge “working memory” relative to us. [This is] indicative that vastly smarter models are going to be achieved fairly easily, with new insight. I don't think your second sentence logically follows from the first. Relative to us, these models: - Have a much larger working memory. - Have much more limited logical reasoning skills. To some extent, these models are able to use their superior w…

> And by the way, we are out of new training data to give the models.

Only easily accessible text data. We haven't really started using video at scale yet for example. It looks like data for specific tasks goes really far too ... for example agentic coding interactions aren't something that has generally been captured on the internet. But capturing interactions with coding agents, in combination with the base-training of existing programming knowledge already captured is resulting in significant performance increases. The amount of specicialed data we might need to gather or synthetically generate is perhaps orders of magnitude less that presumed with pure supervised learning systems. And for other applications like industrial automation or robotics we've barely started capturing all the sensor data that lives in those systems.

Re: How large are large language models?

#112
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

Yea. Same for a 8gb stable diffusion image generator. Sure not the best quality. But there is so much information inside.

Re: How large are large language models?

#113
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

8.1 GB is a lot!

It is 64,800,000,000 bits.

I can imagine 100 bits sure. And 1,000 bits why not. 10,000 you lose me. A million? That sounds like a lot. Now 64 million would be a number I can't well imagine. And this is a thousand times 64 million!

Re: How large are large language models?

#114
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

they're an upgraded version of self-executable zip files that compresses knowledge like mp3 compresses music, without knowing exactly wtf are either music nor knowledge

the self-execution is the interactive chat interface.

wikipedia gets "trained" (compiled+compressed+lossy) into an executable you can chat with, you can pass this through another pretrained A.I. than can talk out the text or transcribe it.

I think writing compilers is now an officially a defunct skill of historical and conservation purposes more than anything else; but I don't like saying "conservation", it's a bad framing, I rather say "legacy connectivity" which is a form of continuity or backwards compatibility

Re: How large are large language models?

#115
post #74

This is somehow missing the Gemma and Gemini series of models from Google. I also think that not mentioning the T5 series of models is strange from a historical perspective because they sort of pioneered many of the concepts in transfer learning and kinda kicked off quite a bit of interest in this space.

The Gemma models are too small to be included in this list. You're right the T5 stuff is very important historically but they're below 11B and I don't have much to say about them. Definitely a very interesting and important set of models though.

Since you included GPT-2, everything from Google including T5 would qualify for the list I would think.

Re: How large are large language models?

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no its not lower than text, its higher ROI than text for understanding the physics of the world, which is exactly what videos are better at than text when it comes to training data

Does that transfer, though? I'm not sure we can expect its ability to approximate physics in video form would transfer to any other mode (text, code, problem solving etc)

depends on the hyperparams but one of the biggest benefits of a latent space is transfer between modalities

Re: How large are large language models?

#117
post #67
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

For reference (according to Google): > The English Wikipedia, as of June 26, 2025, contains over 7 million articles and 63 million pages. The text content alone is approximately 156 GB, according to Wikipedia's statistics page. When including all revisions, the total size of the database is roughly 26 terabytes (26,455 GB)

What happens if you ask this 8gb model "Compose a realistic Wikipedia-style page on the Pokemon named Charizard"?

How close does it come?

Re: How large are large language models?

#118
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

[deleted]

Re: How large are large language models?

#119
post #67
post #30

Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t…

For reference (according to Google): > The English Wikipedia, as of June 26, 2025, contains over 7 million articles and 63 million pages. The text content alone is approximately 156 GB, according to Wikipedia's statistics page. When including all revisions, the total size of the database is roughly 26 terabytes (26,455 GB)

Wikipedia itself describes its size as ~25GB without media [0]. And it's probably more accurate and with broader coverage in multiple languages compared to the LLM downloaded by the GP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

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