this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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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".
If anything that sounds like an indictment? Like, the current models are so incredibly fucking bad that we could achieve the same with three bits and a ham sandwich
Oh it definitely says something about the current models for sure