For people interested in AI research, there's nothing new here. IMO they should do a better job of referencing existing papers and techniques. The way they wrote about "adaptors" can make it seem like it's something novel, but it's actually just re-iterating vanilla LoRA. It was enough to convince one of the top-voted HackerNews comments that this was a "huge development". Benchmarks are nice though.
* Clearly outlining their intent/policies for training/data use. Committing to no using user data or interactions for training their base models is IMO actually a pretty big deal and a differentiator from everyone else.
* There's a never-ending stream of new RL variants ofc, but that's how technology advances, and I'm pretty interested to see how these compare with the rest: "We have developed two novel algorithms in post-training: (1) a rejection sampling fine-tuning algorithm with teacher committee, and (2) a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) algorithm with mirror descent policy optimization and a leave-one-out advantage estimator. We find that these two algorithms lead to significant improvement in the model’s instruction-following quality."
* I'm interested to see how their custom quantization compares with the current SoTA (probably AQLM atm)
* It looks like they've done some interesting optimizations to lower TTFT, this includes the use of some sort of self-speculation. It looks like they also have a new KV-cache update mechanism and looking forward to reading about that as well. 0.6ms/token means that for your average I dunno, 20 token query you might only wait 12ms for TTFT (I have my doubts, maybe they're getting their numbers from much larger prompts, again, I'm interested to see for myself)
* Yes, it looks like they're using pretty standard LoRAs, the more interesting part is their (automated) training/re-training infrastructure but I doubt that's something that will be shared. The actual training pipeline (feedback collection, refinement, automated deployment) is where the real meat and potatoes of being able to deploy AI for prod/at scale lies. Still, what they shared about their tuning procedures is still pretty interesting, as well as seeing which models they're comparing against.
As this article doesn't claim to be a technical report or a paper, while citations would be nice, I can also understand why they were elided. OpenAI has done the same (and sometimes gotten heat for it, like w/ Matroyshka embeddings). For all we know, maybe the original author had references, or maybe since PEFT isn't new to those in the field, that describing it is just being done as a service to the reader - at the end of the day, it's up to the reader to make their own judgements on what's new or not, or a huge development or not. From my reading of the article, your conclusion, which funnily enough is now the new top-rated comment on this thread isn't actually much more accurate the the one old one you're criticizing.