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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: 0.017s | 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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agumonkey ◴[02 Jul 25 14:00 UTC] No.44443840[source]▶
Intelligence is compression some say
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1. tshaddox ◴[02 Jul 25 17:59 UTC] No.44446842[source]▶
Some say that. But what I value even more than compression is the ability to create new ideas which do not in any way exist in the set of all previously-conceived ideas.
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2. benreesman ◴[02 Jul 25 21:59 UTC] No.44449294[source]▶
I'm toying with the phrase "precedented originality" as a way to describe the optimal division of labor when I work with Opus 4 running hot (which is the first one where I consistently come out ahead by using it). That model at full flog seems to be very close to the asymptote for the LLM paradigm on coding: they've really pulled out all the stops (the temperature is so high it makes trivial typographical errors, it will discuss just about anything, it will churn for 10, 20, 30 seconds to first token via API).

Its good enough that it has changed my mind about the fundamental utility of LLMs for coding in non-Javascript complexity regimes.

But its still not an expert programmer, not by a million miles, there is no way I could delegate my job to it (and keep my job). So there's some interesting boundary that's different than I used to think.

I think its in the vicinity of "how much precedent exists for this thought or idea or approach". The things I bring to the table in that setting have precedent too, but much more tenuously connected to like one clear precedent on e.g. GitHub, because if the thing I need was on GitHub I would download it.