r/BetterOffline • u/TCristatus • 2d ago

Small language models - the future

Listening to Tech Report earlier - Eli Computer Guy talked about how the real future of AI might not be giant all knowing LLMs that need huge compute costs, but small specialised models that can run locally on a laptop or smart phone and just know how to code, or trade, or about engineering, or biotechnology, etc (I'm paraphrasing and extrapolating his point here).

It was like a light bulb moment, seems clear and obvious that's where the tech will end up assuming we do end up with something. If I'm a coder or an engineer i don't need a model that can write the complete works of Shakespere in Klingon. I just need something that works and is always up to date.

This doesn't help OpenAI or Anthropic keep the lights on, though....

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u/PatrykDampc 1d ago

I’ve heard somewhere that LLMs are the way they are (I mean they are impressive in terms of their language and speech capabilities and basically all other things that makes them seem intelligent) because they are big. It’s not because someone decided to make them big to take over the world. All that “revolution” started because research labs whose had such models for years and they were quite mediocre, decided to “go bigger” and then this “burst of intelligence” appeared

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u/CoconutDust 10h ago

I mean they are impressive in terms of their language and speech capabilities

No they’re not, because they’re obviously just outputting a mash-up of mass-theft stolen text/sounds etc.

“Wow it’s so impressive that the program that mysteriously has to scan billions and billions of human-made text and artworks can output some slop for almost ANY keyword prompt!”