| ▲ | autuni 3 hours ago |
| I think this kind of change will pop up more often. In software engineering, we learned a long time ago that giant monoliths are not the answer. You want smaller, but specialized units that work together. They perform better at their specific task, are more maintainable, you can just upgrade one part of the system without having to impact the others, .... I don't know where the focus on building a single model that can do everything comes from. |
|
| ▲ | Geezus_42 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I was thinking about this recently as well. Smaller, specialized models that can run on device just make so much more sense to me than these huge generalized models that need huge infrastructure run. |
|
| ▲ | ivell 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I am not sure a best practice in one area translates nicely to another. LLM's power comes with it being a monolith. |
| |
| ▲ | 9rx an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > LLM's power comes with it being a monolith. Does it? All of the latest frontier models that have made technical details publicly available are using MoE; smaller specialized units that work together. | |
| ▲ | autuni 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Does it though? Let's say you use an LLM to write code, do you think it benefits from the fact that the same model is capable of translating corporate messaging into internet slang for marketing? I would assume a smaller model trained specifically to produce code based on natural language input would perform at least just as well, which would already be better given the smaller size / probably lower training resource requirements.
This is of course, as already said, an assumption. But generalizing typically comes at a cost, there is no reason why this wouldn't apply to LLMs, it even applies to humans. | | |
| ▲ | IanCal 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Or would it be worse as it wouldn’t have the broader knowledge to understand the reason you’re coding what you are anyway, understand the logs and iterate? Coding an exercise app will benefit from a model that can code and understands what exercise is. A car showroom website will benefit from a model that understands what relevant filters would be. | |
| ▲ | heggy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn't this just the Bitter Lesson over and over again? Specialised approaches get outperformed by more compute and a simpler general approach pretty much every time. | | |
| ▲ | try-working 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Bitter lesson is wrong. Large general models are outperformed by small specialized models. |
|
|
|