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How large are large language models?

(gist.github.com)
262 points rain1 | 1 comments | 02 Jul 25 10:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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. ysofunny ◴[02 Jul 25 20:28 UTC] No.44448452[source]▶
they're an upgraded version of self-executable zip files that compresses knowledge like mp3 compresses music, without knowing exactly wtf are either music nor knowledge

the self-execution is the interactive chat interface.

wikipedia gets "trained" (compiled+compressed+lossy) into an executable you can chat with, you can pass this through another pretrained A.I. than can talk out the text or transcribe it.

I think writing compilers is now an officially a defunct skill of historical and conservation purposes more than anything else; but I don't like saying "conservation", it's a bad framing, I rather say "legacy connectivity" which is a form of continuity or backwards compatibility