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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • Yes, but its clearly a building block of Meta’s LLM training effort, and part of a pattern.

    One implication I didn’t mention, and don’t have hard proof I can point to, is garbage in garbage out. Meta let AI slop and human garbage proliferate on Facebook, squandering basically the biggest advantage (besides cash) they have. It’s often speculated that, as it turns out, Twitter and Facebook training data is kinda crap.

    …And they’re at it again. Zuckerberg pours cash into corporate trash and get slop back. It’s an internal disaster, like their own divisions.

    On the other side, it’s often thought that Chinese models are so good for their size/compute because they’re ahem getting data from the Chinese government, and don’t need to worry about legal issues.


  • The research community already knows this.

    Llama 4 (Meta’s flagship ‘AI’ project) was as bad release. That’s fine. This is interative research; not every experiment works out.

    …But it was also a messy and dishonest one.

    The release was pushed early and full of bugs. They lied about its performance, especially at long context, going so far as to game Chat Arena with a finetune. Zuckerberg hyped the snot out of it, to the point I saw ads for it on Axios.

    Instead of Meta saying they’ll do better, they said they’re reorganizing their divisions to focus on ‘applications’ instead of fundamental research, aka exactly the wrong thing. They’ve hermmoraged good researchers and kept AI bros, far as I can tell from the outside.

    Every top LLM trainer has controversies. Just recently Qwen (Alibaba) closed off their top base models just to spite Deepseek, so they can’t distill them. Deepseek is almost certainly training on Google Gemini traces. Google hoards their best research for API models and has chased being sycophantic like ChatGPT. X’s Grok is a joke, and muddied by Musk’s constant lies about, for instance, open sourcing it. Some great outfits like 01ai (the Yi series) faded into the night.

    …But I haven’t seen self-destruction quite like Meta’s. Especially considering the ‘f you’ money and GPU farm they have. They’re still pushing interesting research now, but the trajectory is awful.


  • ChatGPT (last time I tried it) is extremely sycophantic though. Its high default sampling also leads to totally unexpected/random turns.

    Google Gemini is now too.

    And they log and use your dark thoughts.

    I find that less sycophantic LLMs are way more helpful. Hence I bounce between Nemotron 49B and a few 24B-32B finetunes (or task vectors for Gemma) and find them way more helpful.

    …I guess what I’m saying is people should turn towards more specialized and “openly thinking” free tools, not something generic, corporate, and purposely overpleasing like ChatGPT or most default instruct tunes.


  • TBH this is a huge factor.

    I don’t use ChatGPT much less use it like it’s a person, but I’m socially isolated at the moment. So I bounce dark internal thoughts off of locally run LLMs.

    It’s kinda like looking into a mirror. As long as I know I’m talking to a tool, it’s helpful, sometimes insightful. It’s private. And I sure as shit can’t afford to pay a therapist out of the gazoo for that.

    It was one of my previous problems with therapy: payment depending on someone else, at preset times (not when I need it). Many sessions feels like they end when I’m barely scratching the surface. Yes therapy is great in general and for deeper feedback/guidance, but still.


    To be clear, I don’t think this is a good solution in general. Tinkering with LLMs is part of my living, I understand the jist of how they work, I tend to use raw completion syntax or even base pretrains.

    But most people anthropomorphize them because that’s how chat apps are presented. That’s problematic.






  • They are GPUs.

    All of them, even the H100, B100, and MI300X all have texture units, pixel shaders, everything. They are graphics cards at a low level. Only the MI300X is missing ROPs, but the Nvidia cards have them (and can run realtime games on Linux), and they all can be used in Blender and such.

    The compute programming languages they use are, fundamentally, hacked up abstractions to map to the same GPU hardware in consumer stuff.

    That’s the whole point, they’re architected as GPUs so that they’re backwards compatible, as everything’s built on the days when consumer gaming GPUs were hacked to be used for compute.


    Are there more dedicated accelerators? Yes. They’re called ASICs, or application specific integrated circuits. This is technically a broad term, but mostly its connotation is very purpose made compute.