Comment by gen220
2 days ago
IDK, 30GB is a lot of data when we're talking about text!
Moby Dick, uncompressed, is ~1MB. Compressed, it's around 500KB.
I feel fairly certain that one could fit all of the textual knowledge required to cultivate a world-class <insert name of preferred professional knowledge worker> in <60,000 Moby Dicks. (Arguably in <5,000 Moby Dicks with intense effort/pruning).
I think a specialized model could squeeze all you need to know about a certain profession in 30GB. But not all professions at once, which is what these models try to do.
Or maybe not, maybe there's a world model needed for human level at any profession that is very hard to quantify and requires more than 30GB by itself.
Yea to be clear I think >70% of the information is not profession specific.
I just think about all the content I’ve consumed in my life to become a professional software developer and I would be very surprised if it couldn’t be adequately represented by <30GB of uncompressed text. Most of the work was in “training”, not really in data.
The “foundational overlap” of K-12 education is identical for most professions with 2-8 years of “finishing” on top.
My mental model is that the budget is spread across maybe 20% genetics (most of our instinctive/genetic information is surely pretty useless), 50% k-12 education, 30% for professionally-specific knowledge.
The human genome is 800MB, (and 500MB with compression according to GPT) so that part is easy.
I think the problem is that the conversation drifted from "all useful human knowledge" to "enough knowledge to do my job".
Both a human and a current large model will bring up unprompted some tax regulation that applies in your district that could matter to your task. A small model won't know the tax code of every city in the world, as it's probably impossible to fit, and it's the kind of thing that unless you already know about, it's very hard to search for, let alone come up with unless specifically prompted about something tax related.
Unless we start having different small models trained for a certain profession for a certain city, I think we'll need those trillion parameters.
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