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Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#251

We fine-tuned a Gemma 2B to identify urgent messages sent by new and expecting mothers on a government-run maternal health helpline. https://idinsight.github.io/tech-blog/blog/enhancing_materna...

lovely application!

Genuine question: why not use (Modern)BERT instead for classification? (Is the json-output explanation so critical?)

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same comments on HN as always. They think EU setting up rules is somehow worse than companies breaking them. We see how the US is turning out without pesky EU restrictions :)

The US has 3x higher salaries, larger houses and a much higher quality of life? I work as a senior engineer in Europe and make barely $4k net per month... and that's considered a "good" salary!

It has higher salaries for privileged people like senior engineers. Try making ends meet in a lower class job.

And you have (almost) free and universal healthcare in Europa, good food available everywhere, drinking water that doesn't poison you, walkable cities, good public transport, somewhat decent police and a functioning legal system. The list goes on. Does this not impact your quality of life? Do you not care about these things?

How can you have a higher quality of life as a society with higher murders, much lower life-expectancy, so many people in jail, in debt, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#253
Before ollama and the others could do structured JSON output, I hacked together my own loop to correct the output. I used it that for dummy API endpoints to pretend to be online services but available locally, to pair with UI mockups. For my first test I made a recipe generator and then tried to see what it would take to "jailbreak" it. I also used uncensored models to allow it to generate all kinds of funny content.

I think the content you can get from the SLMs for fake data is a lot more engaging than say the ruby ffaker library.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#254

Tiny language models can do a lot if they are fine tuned for a specific task, but IMO a few things are holding them back: 1. Getting the speed gains is hard unless you are able to pay for dedicated GPUs. Some services offer LoRA as serverless but you don't get the same performance for various technical reasons. 2. Lack of talent to actually do the finetuning. Regular engineers can do a lot of LLM implementation, but…

when you say fine-tuning skills or talent are scarce, do you have specific skills in mind? perhaps engineering for training models (eg making model parallelism work)? or the more ML type skills of designing experiments, choosing which methods to use, figuring out datasets for training, hyperparam tuning/evaluation, etc?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#255

Tiny language models can do a lot if they are fine tuned for a specific task, but IMO a few things are holding them back: 1. Getting the speed gains is hard unless you are able to pay for dedicated GPUs. Some services offer LoRA as serverless but you don't get the same performance for various technical reasons. 2. Lack of talent to actually do the finetuning. Regular engineers can do a lot of LLM implementation, but…

when you say fine-tuning skills or talent are scarce, do you have specific skills in mind? perhaps engineering for training models (eg making model parallelism work)? or the more ML type skills of designing experiments, choosing which methods to use, figuring out datasets for training, hyperparam tuning/evaluation, etc?

The technical parts are less common and specialized, like understanding the hyperparameters and all that, but I don't think that is the main problem. Most people don't understand how to build a good dataset or how to evaluate their finetune after training. Some parts of this are solid rules like always use a separate validation set, but the task dependent parts are harder to teach. It's a different problem every time.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#256
post #214

I built https://ffprompt.ryanseddon.com using the chrome ai (Gemini nano). Allows you to do ffmpeg operations on videos using natural language all client side.

What are the prerequisites for this? I keep getting "Bummer, looks like your device doesn't support Chrome AI" on macOS 15.2 Chrome 132.0.6834.84 (Official Build) (arm64)

[Edit] Found it. I had to enable chrome://flags/#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#257
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has 3x higher salaries, larger houses and a much higher quality of life? I work as a senior engineer in Europe and make barely $4k net per month... and that's considered a "good" salary!

It has higher salaries for privileged people like senior engineers. Try making ends meet in a lower class job. And you have (almost) free and universal healthcare in Europa, good food available everywhere, drinking water that doesn't poison you, walkable cities, good public transport, somewhat decent police and a functioning legal system. The list goes on. Does this not impact your quality of life? Do you not care ab…

Touch grass. The US is a big place and is nothing like you seem to think it is.

Europe on the other hand can't even manage to defend itself and relies on the US for their sheer existence.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#259

I have a small fish script I use to prompt a model to generate three commit messages based off of my current git diff. I'm still playing around with which model comes up with the best messages, but usually I only use it to give me some ideas when my brain isn't working. All the models accomplish that task pretty well. Here's the script: https://github.com/nozzlegear/dotfiles/blob/master/fish-func... And for this chan…

Interesting idea. But those say what’s in the commit. The commit diff already tells you that. The best commit messages IMO tell you why you did it and what value was delivered. I think it’s gonna be hard for an LLM to do that since that context lives outside the code. But maybe it would, if you hook it to e.g. a ticketing system and include relevant tickets so it can grab context. For instance, in your first example,…

Typically I put the "why" of the commit in the body unless it's a super simple change, but that's a good point. Sometimes this function does generate a commit body to go with the summary, and sometimes it doesn't. It also has a habit of only looking at the first file in a diff and basing its messages off of that, instead of considering the whole patch.

I'll tweak the prompt when I have some time today and see if I can get some more consistency out of it.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone doing anything cool with tiny language models?

#260

I built an Excel Add-In that allows my girlfriend to quickly filter 7000 paper titles and abstracts for a review paper that she is writing [1]. It uses Gemma 2 2b which is a wonderful little model that can run on her laptop CPU. It works surprisingly well for this kind of binary classification task. The nice thing is that she can copy/paste the titles and abstracts in to two columns and write e.g. "=PROMPT(A1:B1, "If…

https://x.com/Suhail/status/1882069209129340963
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