I love the title "Big LLMs" because it means that we are now making a distinction between big LLMs and minute LLMs and maybe medium LLMs. I'd like to propose the we call them "Tall LLMs", "Grande LLMs", and "Venti LLMs" just to be precise.
I'd prefer to see olive sizes get a renaissance. I was always amused by Super Colossal when following my mom around a store as a little kid.
From a random web search, it seems the sizes above Large are: Extra Large, Jumbo, Extra Jumbo, Giant, Colossal, Super Colossal, Mammoth, Super Mammoth, Atlas.
And I'd love to see data compression terminology get an overhaul. Do we need big LLMs or just succinct data structures? Or maybe "compact" would be good enough? (Yeah LLMs are cool but why not just, you know, losslessly compress the actual data in a way that lets us query its content?)
I wonder how does the skinnies get dressed oversea: I wear European S which translate to XXS in the US, but there’s many people skinnier than me, still within a “normal" BMI. Do they have to find XXXS? Do they wear oversized clothes? Choosing trousers is way easier because the system of cm/inches of length+perimeter correspond to real values.
It's a crazy experience being just physically larger than most of the world. Especially when the size on the label carries some implicit shame/judgement. Like I'm skinny, I'm pretty much the lowest weight I can be and not look emaciated / worrying. But when shopping for a skirt in Asian sizes I was a 4XL, and usually an or L-2XL in European sizes. Having to shift my mental space that a US M is the "right" size for me was hard for many years. But like I guess this is how sizing was always kinda supposed to work.
The shame is inherent to the crushing expectations put on women's appearances and the pressure to be small. It manifests in clothing sizing for the same reason it manifests standing on a scale, it's a measure of your smallness. And what makes it insidious is that the measures are juuust comparable enough across different people to make people feel bad for not having the same numbers as someone 5" shorter than you.
And my experience isn't unique in any way here and it's really hard to not see it pervasive through our culture.
I worked at a Norwegian hospital once which had sizes from xxl (ekstra ekstra liten) to xxs (ekstra ekstra stor). So it's simple, you cross the ocean, you go from size xxl to xxs without having to do anything at all...
I should say though, that's the only place I've seen this particular localization.
For healthy adults, thirst is a perfectly adequate guide to hydration needs. Historically normal patterns of drinking - e.g. water with meals and a few cups of tea or coffee in between - are perfectly sufficient unless you're doing hard physical labour or spending long periods of time outdoors in hot weather. The modern American preoccupation with constantly drinking water is a peculiar cultural phenomenon with no scientific basis.
Weirdly enough, the ITU already chose the superlative for the bigliest radio frequency band to be Tremendous:
- Extremely Low Frequency (ELF)
- Super Low Frequency (SLF)
- Ultra Low Frequency (ULF)
- Very Low Frequency (VLF)
- Low Frequency (LF)
- Medium Frequency (MF)
- High Frequency (HF)
- Very High Frequency (VHF)
- Ultra High Frequency (UHF)
- Super High Frequency (SHF)
- Extremely High Frequency (EHF)
- Tremendously High Frequency (THF)
Maybe one day some very smart people will make Tremendously Large Language Models. They will be very large and need a lot of computer. And then you'll have the Extremely Small Language Model. They are like nothing.
"The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) was a conceptual design by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) organisation for an extremely large telescope, which was intended to have a single aperture of 100 metres in diameter. Because of the complexity and cost of building a telescope of this unprecedented size, ESO has decided to focus on the 39-metre diameter Extremely Large Telescope instead."
I like tremendous as an adjective for a frequency range because etymologically it can be traced to the Latin word for 'shaking'. Tremendous, horrendous, terrible all kinda mean "makes you shake".
Horrendous being based on the Latin root for "trembling with fear", tremendous on another Latin root meaning "shaking from excitement" and terrible deriving from a Greek root for, again, "trembling with fear".
I've sat in more than one board meeting watching them take 20 minutes to land on t-shirt sizes. The greatest enterprise sales minds of our generation...
I’ve seen corporate slogans fired off from the shoulders of viral creatives. Synergy-beams glittering in the darkness of org charts. Thought leadership gone rogue… All these moments will be lost to NDAs and non-disparagement clauses, like engagement metrics in a sea of pivot decks.
But of course these are all flavors of "large", so then we have big large language models, medium large language models, etc, which does indeed make the tall/grande/venti names appropriate, or perhaps similar "all large" condom size names (large, huge, gargantuan).
One example of this is “Sorry I was very drunk and went home and
crashed straight into bed” being summarized by Apple Intelligence as ”Drunk and crashed”.
I think the real problem with LLMs is we have deterministic expectations of non-deterministic tools. We’ve been trained to expect that the computer is correct.
Personally, I think the summaries of alerts is incredibly useful. But my expectation of accuracy for a 20 word summary of multiple 20-30 word summaries is tempered by the reality that’s there’s gonna be issues given the lack of context. The point of the summary is to help me determine if I should read the alerts.
LLMs break down when we try to make them independent agents instead of advanced power tools. Alot of people enjoy navel gazing and hand waving about ethics, “safety” and bias… then proceed to do things with obvious issues in those areas.
I want a tiny_phone_based LLM to do thought tracking and comms awareness..
I actually applied to YC in like ~2014 or such for thus;
-JotPlot - I wanted a timeline for basically giving a histo timeline of comms btwn me and others - such that I had a sankey-ish diagram for when and whom and via method I spoke with folks and then each node eas the message, call, text, meta links...
I think its still viable - but my thought process is too currently chaotic to pull it off.
Basically looking at a timeline of your comms and thoughts and expand into links of thought - now with LLMs you could have a Throw Tag od some sort whereby you have the bot do work on research expanding on certain things and plugging up a site for that Idea on LOCAL HOST (i.e. your phone so that you can pull up data relevant to the convo - and its all in a timeline of thought/stream of conscious
I had a thought that I think some people value social media (e.g. Facebook) essentially for this. Like giving up your Facebook profile means giving up your history or family tree or even your memories.
So in that sense, maybe people would prefer a private alternative.
it's too bad vLLM and VLM are taken because it would have been nice to recycle the VLSI solution to describing sizes - get to very large language models and leave it at that.
Yes, that's the point of the comment and the whole discussion here. LLMs are already Large so what should the prefix be? Big LLM is a strong contender. I'm also pretty sure the creator of redis is not "someone who doesn't understand the subject matter at all".
It's very common for experts on one subject to take a jab at another subject and depend on their reputation while their skillset doesn't translate at all.