My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

Yes, the open-models have surpassed my expectations in both quality and speed of release. For a bit of context, when chatgpt launched in Dec22, the "best" open models were GPT-J(~6-7B) and GPT-neoX (~22B?). I actually had an app running live, with users, using gpt-j for ~1 month. It was a pain. The quality was abysmal, there was no instruction following (you had to start your prompt like a story, or come up with a bunch of examples and hope the model will follow along) and so on.

And then something happened, LLama models got "leaked" (I still think it was a on purpose leak - don't sue us, we never meant to release, etc), and the rest is history. With L1 we got lots of optimisations like quantised models, fine-tuning and so on, L2 really saw fine-tuning go off (most of the fine-tunes were better than what meta released), we got alpaca showing off LoRA, and then a bunch of really strong models came out (mistrals, mixtrals, L3, gemmas, qwens, deepseeks, glms, granites, etc.)

By some estimations the open models are ~6mo behind what SotA labs have released. (note that doesn't mean the labs are releasing their best models, it's likely they keep those in house to use on next runs data curation, synthetic datasets, for distilling, etc). Being 6mo behind is NUTS! I never in my wildest dreams believed we'll be here. In fact I thought it would take ~2years to reach gpt3.5 levels. It's really something insane that we get to play with these models "locally", fine-tune them and so on.

I know how to make an SD LoRA, and use it. I've known how to do that for 2 years. So what's the big secret about LLM LoRA?

0: https://axolotl.ai/ and https://docs.axolotl.ai/

I imagine with the finetunes you have to worry about self-hosting, model utilization, and then also retraining the model as new base models come out. I'm curious under what circumstances you've found that the benefits outweigh the downsides.

- (shameless plug) My company, Synthetic, supports LoRAs for Llama 3.1 8b and 70b: https://synthetic.new All you need to do is give us the Hugging Face repo and we take care of the rest. If you want other people to try your model, we charge usage to them rather than to you. (We can also host full finetunes of anything vLLM supports, although we charge by GPU-minute for full finetunes rather than the cheaper per-token pricing for supported base model LoRAs.)

- Together.ai supports a slightly wider number of base models than we do, with a bit more config required, and any usage is charged to you.

- Fireworks does the same as Together, although they quantize the models more heavily (FP4 for the higher-end models). However, they support Llama 4, which is pretty nice although fairly resource-intensive to train.

If you have reasonably good data for your task, and your task is relatively "narrow" (i.e. find a specific kind of bug, rather than general-purpose coding; extract a specific kind of data from legal documents rather than general-purpose reasoning about social and legal matters; etc), finetunes of even a very small model like an 8b will typically outperform — by a pretty wide margin — even very large SOTA models while being a lot cheaper to run. For example, if you find yourself hand-coding heuristics to fix some problem you're seeing with an LLM's responses, it's probably more robust to just train a small model finetune on the data and have the finetuned model fix the issues rather than writing hardcoded heuristics. On the other hand, no amount of finetuning will make an 8b model a better general-purpose coding agent than Claude 4 Sonnet.