this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
765 points (99.0% liked)
TechTakes
1544 readers
220 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
quants are pretty basic. switching from floats to ints (faster instruction sets) are the well known issues. both those are related to information theory, but there are other things I legally can't mention. shrug. suffice to say the model sizes are going to be decreasing dramatically.
edit: the first two points require reworking the base infrastructure to support which is why they havent hit widespread adoption. but the research showing that 3 bits is as good as 64 is intuitive once you tie the original inspiration for some of the AI designs. that reduction alone means you can get 21x reduction in model size is pretty solid.
hahahaha fuck off with this. no, the horseshit you’re fetishizing doesn’t fix LLMs. here’s what quantization gets you:
anyway speaking of basic information theory:
lol
I have seen these 3 bit ai papers on hacker news a few times. And the takeaway apparently is: the current models are being pretty shitty at what we want them to do, and we can reach a similar (but slightly worse) level of shittyness with 3 bits.
But that doesn't say anything about how both technologies could progress in the future. I guess you can compensate for having only three bits to pass between nodes by just having more nodes. But that doesn't really seem helpful, neither for storage nor compute.
Anyways yeah it always strikes me as a kind of trend that maybe has an application in a very specific niche but is likely bullshit if applied to the general case
Far as I can tell, the only real benefit here is significant energy savings, which would take LLMs from "useless waste of a shitload of power" to "useless waste of power".