nbardy
Joined 12 years ago
Joined 12 years ago
We already know OpenAI has "bel" that is MUCH better than astra and is being used internally
Step 1. Model can’t do something challenging Step 2. You try a bunch and fail Step 3. Anthropic trains on your usage data. Your current code base and current problem are now in domain Step 4. Model comes out and you’re shocked when it can tackle the thing you were stuck on Step 4. Codebase drifts significantly and you try new problems you thought were a similar level. Your code is less familiar and the problem doesn’t have a bunch of failure cases in the train set. Feels of it being worse on similar problems
LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user.
This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.
Finetuning model is cheap and incredibly useful for deployment. You don't need to pre-train a frontier llm from scratch to make useful models.
There is tons of domains where you and fine-tune llms and deploy them for value in companies and for your own entrepreneurship ambitions. I have made this a big part of my career for the last few years and now I'm working on finetuning models for starting my own companies.
In my software engineering jobs there was always strong top down product direction. In my AI research jobs people are often staring at me blankly waiting for me to tell them what we can do.
A young industry the only people who really understand the potential of what the technology can do are the experts and practioners.
Overtime all the best ideas get picked off, and the general population who are non practitioners gain enough knowledge that they can understand what the technology can do better than the experts how can impliment it.
Where: E = Efficiency, and efficiency gains come from quality of data, quality of algorithms. C = Compute (Size of model, flops of train run)
So a better company can train a bigger and better model with less required compute which let's anthropic get there first. If another company does the same thing with a worse: model architecture, kernel, optimizer, etc... They will get there as well if they just run there train run with more flops for longer
Mythos was actually ready about 6 months ago. So if you have 6 months later or hardware setup and time to train you can get a lot done.
Small llms are still way more efficiently server on big GPUs.
Sharing server capacity takes advantage of the massive parallel throughput and sharing of memory bandwidth.
You are sharing the GPUs with thousands of concurrent users.
I loved writing GPU shaders or optimizing visualization performance, but most of the time it was wiring up netcode to UI elements that exist.
Ironically as I've moved into focusing on more GPU and kernel programming AI is now lapping me there anyway, however the impact of knowing what sort of algorithsm are state of the art in papers, what is causing memory bandwidth issues etc... does a lot to drive the machine.
Multimodal models
Language models for art