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[–] 18 points 12 hours ago (7 children)

It’s because they’re hitting model size constraints. There’s only so much memory bandwidth you can get between racks or even rack spaces and memory bandwidth is the constraint for nearly every ml thing.

Expect a reversal once a more memory dense component hits.

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 10 hours ago (6 children)

    There's no reason to think that the architecture itself can scale indefinitely. It might very well be that LLMs have some hard constraints on the scope of the problems they're capable of solving.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 hours ago (4 children)

    Of course, that’s what I’m saying. Physical constraints of hardware mean there’s a limit to how much further (read: larger in terms of working memory footprint, because that’s how they’re getting “better” and better “frontier” models) development can continue until a more dense component comes along.

    Every singularity a sigmoid.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (3 children)

    I meant that simply making models bigger might not actually make them more capable. So even if you had unlimited hardware to play with, you might have to find a different approach.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago (2 children)

    You could create a way to measure the idea of capability that would bear that out but from a pure discrete mathematics perspective, no, you only get better with a larger memory footprint.

    There’s a lot of ways to make that faster or make that behave like a process running on a bigger memory footprint, but ultimately that’s the constraint.

    And companies competing in the field of ai can’t justify the expense of cutting down their gigantic model to only know how to identify wood because that has a known and limited impact. They already said they’re shooting for unlimited immeasurable impact on the scale of replacing all human labor and got massive funding for it.

    It doesn’t matter if it’s easier to do one backflip, you asked me to triple dog dare you to do a million backflips. Well… we’re waiting!

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 child)

    Again, there is no reason to think that you can just keep making the model bigger and keep getting improved capability that way. In fact, we already know that's not the case because simply making them bigger stopped being the focus. The real breakthrough is going to come from better algorithms.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 minutes ago

    You said there’s no reason to think you can just keep making the model bigger and keep getting improved capability.

    there’s the structure of the neural network itself. Fundamentally, adding nodes and layers increases the ability of the model to handle more complex input.

    Then there’s the actual models we see in use. They are literally as large as the hardware allows. The only reason to use smaller models are to fit some constraint.

    So both by the book and in practice bigger is always better.

    Now we can’t always go big. I can’t afford to purchase a dgx or even upgrade my wiring to power it, let alone pay the power bill it would rack up or all the other utilities alone when my wife leaves me because of the sound.

    My computer can only fit so many expansion cards and pcie is so slow compared to hbm that I’m better off running a small model quickly that fits on one card as opposed to a larger one slowly across several cards.

    But those are all constraints. When I replace my motherboard with supermicro gpu host fabric I no longer am limited by the pcie bandwidth and can quickly use models that fit across several cards.

    I do agree with you that the future is smaller models, not because of the fundamental nature of the concepts involved but because of the complex constraints that are coming into play.

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