Live data from Hacker News

Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

arxiv.org

21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#21

If you want to believe that the success of Kimi is about distillation attacks, ignore this.

You can’t build a frontier model with one single thing. This is an incremental improvement but it doesn’t explain the entire success of the model. The training set is immensely important, regardless of how you feel about distillation.

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#23
post #20

Does any expert in the field know whether it is really the case that this intelligence we are seeing with frontier models is an "emerging" phenomena, only coming up when the architecture is scaled? Like isn't it weird that the 1 million parameter model with the same architecture can't solve basic puzzles but suddenly the 1 trillion parameter can conjure up counter-examples for the Jacobian conjecture? It's unintuitiv…

http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#24
post #20

Does any expert in the field know whether it is really the case that this intelligence we are seeing with frontier models is an "emerging" phenomena, only coming up when the architecture is scaled? Like isn't it weird that the 1 million parameter model with the same architecture can't solve basic puzzles but suddenly the 1 trillion parameter can conjure up counter-examples for the Jacobian conjecture? It's unintuitiv…

Here's one way it could happen:

Let's say there's some circuit that does problem solving of the kind we call intelligence.

We dont know what this circuit looks like, but it exists in our brain.

Doing regression on outputs from the brain (e.g. internet text) with enough parameters, we can "fit" our model to this circuit.

But if you try to fit it with fewer parameters than it needs, you're just going to get some linear approximation.

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#25
post #20

Does any expert in the field know whether it is really the case that this intelligence we are seeing with frontier models is an "emerging" phenomena, only coming up when the architecture is scaled? Like isn't it weird that the 1 million parameter model with the same architecture can't solve basic puzzles but suddenly the 1 trillion parameter can conjure up counter-examples for the Jacobian conjecture? It's unintuitiv…

IANAMLE, but there is "grokking" that makes models learn to actually generalize, even after you give them enough parameters that would let them memorize the dataset:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokking_(machine_learning)

High-dimensional gradient descent behaves very differently than the simplified 3d visualisations we use to demonstrate it, and has lots of ways out of local minima:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrO20Jb-hy0

so it seems like there is a benefit to giving models more space to learn in rather than forcing them to compress the knowledge from the start.

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#26
post #20

Does any expert in the field know whether it is really the case that this intelligence we are seeing with frontier models is an "emerging" phenomena, only coming up when the architecture is scaled? Like isn't it weird that the 1 million parameter model with the same architecture can't solve basic puzzles but suddenly the 1 trillion parameter can conjure up counter-examples for the Jacobian conjecture? It's unintuitiv…

it's certainly not a definite procedure for determining if an arbitrary mathematical statement is true or not. it's more like educated guess and check which definitely scales up

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#27
post #20

Does any expert in the field know whether it is really the case that this intelligence we are seeing with frontier models is an "emerging" phenomena, only coming up when the architecture is scaled? Like isn't it weird that the 1 million parameter model with the same architecture can't solve basic puzzles but suddenly the 1 trillion parameter can conjure up counter-examples for the Jacobian conjecture? It's unintuitiv…

This is actually a well-known phenomenon in ML, called "The Bitter Lesson".

> One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.

The full essay is worth a read, it's pretty short http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#28

If you want to believe that the success of Kimi is about distillation attacks, ignore this.

False dichotomy right? Are Chinese labs impressively innovating? Clearly. However this doesn’t rule out possible gains due to distillation. I don’t know the degree of the latter but both things could certainly be true.

“Distillation” is just indirectly pirating the largely pirated training data used to train the original model.

“You stole my warez!”

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#29
post #20

Does any expert in the field know whether it is really the case that this intelligence we are seeing with frontier models is an "emerging" phenomena, only coming up when the architecture is scaled? Like isn't it weird that the 1 million parameter model with the same architecture can't solve basic puzzles but suddenly the 1 trillion parameter can conjure up counter-examples for the Jacobian conjecture? It's unintuitiv…

It might be that what we consider a basic and very hard puzzle are extremely close together on a more absolute scale. The difference is often for us what proportion of humans can solve it. And the low end of that is still quite high up - animals that can solve things that are very basic for the vast majority of humans are pretty rare and known about, yet are capable of quite complex actions and learning and aren’t wildly different in scale of neurons to us.

Going from 1m to 1T params is also a scaling of a million times. It’s like going from a human brain down to one percent in size in each direction or just a few mm.

Re: Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

#30

If you want to believe that the success of Kimi is about distillation attacks, ignore this.

Well said.

The distillation theory does not even make sense as Fable was only around for days (effectively) before Kimi was released.

Post reply on HN