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Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

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21–30 of 223 posts

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, No doubt Qwen 3.6 open weights are far more strong

Why no doubt?

No comparison with competitor models other than the previous granite version strongly implies that it does not compete well with other comparable models. At least this is the most reasonable assumption until data comes out to the contrary

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#22
post #9

> Full stop. Why people don't edit out obvious sloppification and expect to still have readers left

Third line in to the article: "But there’s one result in the benchmarks I keep coming back to." I hear this sort of thing all the time now on YouTube from media/news personalities: “And that’s the part nobody seems to be talking about.” "And here's what keeps me up at night." “This is where the story gets complicated.” “Here’s the piece that doesn’t quite fit.” “And this is where the usual explanation starts to break…

I notice this very often in LinkedIn posts, and it's annoying, but I had not realized it was LLM-speak? Isn't it possible that people write like this naturally?

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#23
post #9

> Full stop. Why people don't edit out obvious sloppification and expect to still have readers left

Third line in to the article: "But there’s one result in the benchmarks I keep coming back to." I hear this sort of thing all the time now on YouTube from media/news personalities: “And that’s the part nobody seems to be talking about.” "And here's what keeps me up at night." “This is where the story gets complicated.” “Here’s the piece that doesn’t quite fit.” “And this is where the usual explanation starts to break…

I think this kind of language predates widespread LLM use, and has been picked up from that kind of writing. It's a "and here's where it gets interesting" pattern that people like Malcolm Gladwell and Freakonomics have used, even if the same thing could be said in a way that makes it sound much less intriguing.

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#24
post #10
post #9

> Full stop. Why people don't edit out obvious sloppification and expect to still have readers left

So are we saying it's fine that the article is written by an LLM as long as it doesn't have the tell-tale signs of LLMs?

An article without telltale signs of an LLM is indistinguishable from an article written by a human, so yes.

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#25

If you really think about why MoE came into existence, its to save significant cost during training, I don't think there was any concrete evidence of performance gains for comparable MoE vs dense models. Over the years, I believe all the new techniques being employed in post training have made the models better.

MoE models will have far more world knowledge than dense models with the same amount of active parameters. MoE is a no-brainer if your inference setup is ultimately limited by compute or memory throughput - not total memory footprint - or alternately if it has fast, high-bandwidth access to lower-tier storage to fetch cold model weights from on demand.

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Qwen 3.6 pushes way above its weight. Granite 8B is impressive, but Qwen still wins on raw capability, especially for coding.

Way above its weight s .

Nanobanana for scale.

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third line in to the article: "But there’s one result in the benchmarks I keep coming back to." I hear this sort of thing all the time now on YouTube from media/news personalities: “And that’s the part nobody seems to be talking about.” "And here's what keeps me up at night." “This is where the story gets complicated.” “Here’s the piece that doesn’t quite fit.” “And this is where the usual explanation starts to break…

I think this kind of language predates widespread LLM use, and has been picked up from that kind of writing. It's a "and here's where it gets interesting" pattern that people like Malcolm Gladwell and Freakonomics have used, even if the same thing could be said in a way that makes it sound much less intriguing.

There's even a word for it: “cliché”

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#28

If you really think about why MoE came into existence, its to save significant cost during training, I don't think there was any concrete evidence of performance gains for comparable MoE vs dense models. Over the years, I believe all the new techniques being employed in post training have made the models better.

I think you mean inference compute? I believe all expert weights are updated in each backward pass during MoE training. The first benefit was getting a sort of structured pruning of weights through the mechanism of expert selection so that the model didn’t need to go through ‘unnecessary’ parts of the model for a given token. This then let inference use memory more efficiently in memory constrained environments, where non-hot or less common experts could be put into slow RAM, or sometimes even streamed off storage.

But I don’t think it necessarily saved training cost; if it did, I’d be interested to learn how!

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#29
post #9

> Full stop. Why people don't edit out obvious sloppification and expect to still have readers left

Third line in to the article: "But there’s one result in the benchmarks I keep coming back to." I hear this sort of thing all the time now on YouTube from media/news personalities: “And that’s the part nobody seems to be talking about.” "And here's what keeps me up at night." “This is where the story gets complicated.” “Here’s the piece that doesn’t quite fit.” “And this is where the usual explanation starts to break…

The language of drama and import without meaningful substance. Words statistically likely to be used in a segue, regardless of the preceding or subsequent point. Particularly effective when it seems like you’re getting let in on a secret. Really fatiguing to read

A writing teacher once excoriated me for saying that something was important. “Don’t tell me it’s important, show me, and let me decide, and if you do your job I’ll agree”

I don’t know how a completion can tell when it needs to do this. Mostly so far it doesn’t seem capable

Re: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Qwen 3.6 pushes way above its weight. Granite 8B is impressive, but Qwen still wins on raw capability, especially for coding.

You just asserted the same thing again. Why do you say this is the case?

[dead]
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