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How large are large language models?

(gist.github.com)
262 points rain1 | 2 comments | 02 Jul 25 10:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.798s | source
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ljoshua ◴[02 Jul 25 13:00 UTC] No.44443222[source]▶
Less a technical comment and more just a mind-blown comment, but I still can’t get over just how much data is compressed into and available in these downloadable models. Yesterday I was on a plane with no WiFi, but had gemma3:12b downloaded through Ollama. Was playing around with it and showing my kids, and we fired history questions at it, questions about recent video games, and some animal fact questions. It wasn’t perfect, but holy cow the breadth of information that is embedded in an 8.1 GB file is incredible! Lossy, sure, but a pretty amazing way of compressing all of human knowledge into something incredibly contained.
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1. ljlolel ◴[02 Jul 25 13:05 UTC] No.44443263[source]▶
How big is Wikipedia text? Within 3X that size with 100% accuracy
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2. phkahler ◴[02 Jul 25 13:41 UTC] No.44443627[source]▶
Google AI response says this for compressed size of wikipedia:

"The English Wikipedia, when compressed, currently occupies approximately 24 GB of storage space without media files. This compressed size represents the current revisions of all articles, but excludes media files and previous revisions of pages, according to Wikipedia and Quora."

So 3x is correct but LLMs are lossy compression.