>It is almost guaranteed that a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA in coding tasks within 2-3 years.

I don't disagree, but how much of this ends up being distillation? I can't help but imagine that 4.8 was probably trained in part by leveraging Mythos.

If the very large models turn out to be very expensive to run relative to the benefits, it's possible that they could end up still being trained, but ultimately used as a tool to create smaller models that are nearly as effective.

I'm curious if someone here with a stronger background in the space has a similar intuition or not.

Scale is always desirable, and there are always gains from scale. It's a matter of whether you can afford training and inference at increased scale.

There is a real trend of smaller models becoming more "capability-dense" - i.e. the best 8Bs of today beat the best 32Bs of 2 years ago. This is in part a product of distillation being used to train the smaller models.

But people consistently underestimate how "capability hungry" the world is. There are diminishing returns on model capabilities in some sort of "summarize the search results" applications, but as capabilities improve, LLMs enter, get their footing in and begin to dominate new niches. At times, expensive, highly desirable niches.

I do not expect anyone at the frontier to pop up and say "no reason to train a new model" within the following decade. There will always be a demand for an LLM that's 5-10% more capable and more reliable at some advanced task, and generational upgrades will keep delivering those 5-10%. From increased scale and improved training both.

It’s really worth distinguishing between old-fashioned student teacher distillation (ie at the level of layers, weights and distributions) and large scale synthetic dataset creation.

The latter is much better (since you can clean up, review, update responses and filter your datasets).

I suspect nobody is doing real student teacher distillation, it’s just easier to do a bunch of training on the same giant corpus then post train on the synthetic corpus with its reasoning traces etc. (which might have been generated by a bigger better LLM)

> I don't disagree, but how much of this ends up being distillation?

A lot, so you can bet tens of millions are flowing to congress to have distillation declared illegal before this happens. And then it'll happen anyway.

> I don't disagree, but how much of this ends up being distillation?

You don't need distillation. They already have the training sets.

It's MLA + MoE + Medusa (a better version of Speculative Decoding) + 1.58b (possibly - maybe nothing) + GRAM (which will almost certainly not turn out to be a nothing burger, but no one has quickly turned this around yet to prove it).