Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 226 posts

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#81

Post by regularfry »

vitro wrote: post #78
regularfry wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, if you know nothing you don't even know what you're missing or what to search for. RAG on the initial prompt would be the first thing to try. > Then, without unlimited context, you have to do research for every task all over again every time. Thing is, we're really really good at building very fast search engines. Doing research all over again every time shouldn't be a problem.

Couldn't you build some internal knowledge that would stay and you could teach a model this way. A very fast local memory of some sort. You could also specialize model this way so it is very skilled in your domain. The more you use it, the smarter it gets. I guess the problem is for the model to decide whether the information stored in memory is sufficient or not.

You could, but it's driving in the wrong direction to try to build that knowledge into the model weights because you'll always run into a capacity limit sooner with a small model than with a larger one. The thing the model is specialised for is linguistic understanding and the reasoning process itself, and you max that out at the expense of domain-specific knowledge. If you take "as few weights as possible" as a given, I think the interesting question is how small you can make the model with externalised memory. The openclaw and hermes people are all over this sort of memory problem: using the local filesystem or a local database of some sort is exactly a "very fast local memory" where the more you use it, the more knowledge it gathers. Whether that translates to it being "smarter" is a deeper question than it looks.

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#82

Post by LoganDark »

numlock86 wrote: post #26
secretslol wrote: post #23

Am I right in thinking this is a tiny model which has been trained well to reason, and that's it? Makes me think of a smart person who doesn't know anything about a given topic, but with the right tools will go and research the heck out of it. I really like the sound of this... why have models train on learning anything when you can just train them how to learn and let them get on with it from something as small as a…

This has been my dream ever since. Instead of encoding "all the knowledge" into those parameters, how about just making a model that has the same size, but all (or rather most) it does is reasoning? Just give it the ability to browse the net (e.g. language specifications, documentation and best practices) and just have it do its thing. Why does my coding agent need to know the population of New York, know a cheese ca…

Reasoning alone can’t always predict all the bits of knowledge you’d need to sufficiently solve a problem, that you would research when planning.

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#83

Post by coldtea »

deftio wrote: post #16

There is some base level of intelligence any model needs to be useful, even in narrow tasks. Could you teach a 5 year old to drive a car? A 10 year old? A 12 year old? To drive a car requires being able to read, to have judgement about ice or rainy conditions, to anticipate a child running after a ball. By the time a human in in their mid teens they have acquired the base knowledge... Small models need to have enough…

>To drive a car requires being able to read

Millions of people do drive who can't read. It's very common in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc, especially rural, but even in cities.

There are places where oral exams and audio-assisted testing is allowed. And there are places where people just drive (and drive fine) not bothering with a license.

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#84

Post by coldtea »

avereveard wrote: post #55
swiftcoder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To drive a car requires being able to read Emphatically, it does not. Passing your drivers test may require being able to read, but plenty of illiterate people around the world drive just fine. There is a reason we made all the common road signs recognisable purely by shape/colour, after all.

Until they reverse on a highway and kill a family. Being able to drive isn't where parent poster put the bar

Not reversing on a highway doesn't require reading, just driving sense.

And whole lot of people have done stupid shit like that while perfectly able to read, many even with masters and PhDs.

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#85

Post by coldtea »

popopo73 wrote: post #70
swiftcoder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what reading has to do with knowing not to reverse on a highway. It's not like they put up big glowing signs that say "wrong way" like in a video game.

In Australia, you will see signs on freeway offramps pointing to any cars attempting to drive on to the freeway 'WRONG WAY GO BACK' [0] Though it is true you don't need to be able to read to operate a vehicle, you /do/ need to be able to read to operate a vehicle safely. And for those who can read: could you teach someone how to drive using an LLM? Sure. Safely? Probably not. [0] https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/oper…

>Though it is true you don't need to be able to read to operate a vehicle, you /do/ need to be able to read to operate a vehicle safely.

Not really. You just need to be able to decipher the sign, which is trivial, even if you can't read it or spell it.

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#86

Post by [deleted] »

supergarfield wrote: post #72
swiftcoder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what reading has to do with knowing not to reverse on a highway. It's not like they put up big glowing signs that say "wrong way" like in a video game.

I agree that drivers should know not to reverse on a highway regardless of local signage. But in situations that could be ambiguous, I think this is a regional difference - the US, Australia, part of the rest of the Americas use lots of text on road signs (including literal "wrong way" signs); Europe and much of the rest of the world use far less text (including purely pictographic "wrong way" signs). Especially impo…

[deleted]

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#87

Post by coldtea »

avereveard wrote: post #69
swiftcoder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what reading has to do with knowing not to reverse on a highway. It's not like they put up big glowing signs that say "wrong way" like in a video game.

There literally are "no u turn" signage where you are supposed not to do that. They literally put up signs for it. It is not glowing in the sky, and it doesnt need to be, and doesnt help making a point strawmanning it.

And it's trivial to learn "no u turn" and a few other basic signs as a graphic, even when you can't read them (or can't read in general).

It's also trivial to do a u turn even when you can read, know what the sign says, and you feel like doing one because no car is coming anyway, and millions of people do that everyday too.

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#88

Post by coldtea »

subscribed wrote: post #62
threatripper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask people who grew up on a farm in a rural area. Sometimes you have to even if you can't and you do.

I was driving a tractor since 12, including on the road with small farm equipment, and indeed, mostly out of the necessity, but I also received a lot of tuition (from licenced drivers) to know how to behave. Different times though.

Not that different. Still happens all the time all over the world (the west included).

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#89

Post by sigmoid10 »

dandaka wrote: post #77
numlock86 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my dream ever since. Instead of encoding "all the knowledge" into those parameters, how about just making a model that has the same size, but all (or rather most) it does is reasoning? Just give it the ability to browse the net (e.g. language specifications, documentation and best practices) and just have it do its thing. Why does my coding agent need to know the population of New York, know a cheese ca…

I think this is a well known concept, which we can't deliver yet. LLM/transformer give us reasoning engine as a byproduct of its design, but it is quite ineffective. If we can distill reasoning, if reasoning can be achieved without general knowledge, it will be a very effective machine. Some amount of knowledge is required for reasoning. Maybe such model can dynamically knowledge domains to have taxonomy. For example…

>Some amount of knowledge is required for reasoning.

This is the root of problem. If you think about STEM universities, they don't really teach you things you need in the real world. They teach you what you need to know in order to go out there and accumulate the necessary information which can then be used to solve problems. Giving a person access to the internet or a super powerful calculator (like Mathematica) won't mean that they can do anything useful. They need tons of experience to use these tools in an effective way. That experience is basically all that implicit adjacent knowledge that we pick up along the way getting our degrees. And LLMs pick that up during pre-training. Drop this part and the outcome will be worthless.

Re: VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO

#90

Post by rcarmo »

gslepak wrote: post #14

Note that these are Python-only results, the model will not do as well with other languages. I'm glad to see more domain-focused SLMs, we need more of them! A programming focused MoE should work well across many languages.

If it writes functional Python instead of cosplaying as a Java programmer and cramming code with classes and accessors, it's already better than Opus...
Post reply on HN