Comment by chorizo

6 hours ago

Baking the base models on to ROM makes a lot of economic sense. SRAM for the KV cache & fine-tunes, not so much. Sure you’d get incredible speeds but it’s not scalable from a die-size or cost perspective.

Rather base model on ROM + KV cache on DRAM is much more scalable. Also this would work great for edge devices that have a 2-5 year lifecycle.

AMD can let the SRAM be on a different chip. Maybe even something similar to their 3D cache. that could increase density to 20B[1]. They could also move from 6nm to 2nm. that would probably increase density by another 3x to 60B.

Add a bunch of chips together, and you get to a server that can run a 800B model, very fast and probably significantly cheaper than others.

[1]https://www.eetimes.com/taalas-specializes-to-extremes-for-e...

Baking the base models on to ROM makes a lot of economic sense.

Less so for consumers though, because it'd mean the phone is out of date in 3 months when a better model comes along.

  • It's a perfect reason to get consumers to buy a new phone every year again! They got bored of the camera.

  • I don’t think average user _needs_ to solve frontier challenges. ”Call to Jane”, ”turn on the lights” and ”what’s the weather this afternoon” is more like it I would guess.

    Ofc if the model has some critical bugs that’s another matter.

    • Your examples worked on phones for over a decade.

      Maybe baking in a model that is "certified" to have some unconditioned truths + rest is pulled from external models/store could make sense. But AFAIK that doesn't exist and I'm not sure it can possibly be made. Perhaps society as a whole at least can work on an open corpus of training data, but I'm not holding my breath on this.

  • And the customers can wait for the new phone released next year. These are edge models - the average customer doesn’t need the latest frontier model. Just needs to be good enough for the features you promised.

  • That's a software engineering problem. They just need to figure out how to fine-tune for alignment and tool usage.

    That's the only thing the normie consumer cares for really.

We also have ReRAM (Analog Computing), which also holds a promising future given its efficiency and low power. Though ReRAM of larger size is still a research area.

It is my understanding that just baking the model itself into silicon only gives moderate gains because memory bandwidth remains a bottleneck.

  • Did you try using the the talaas chat? Something stupid like 18k tokens/second.

    Think it's called Askjimmy or similar.