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Comment by bkaae

5 days ago

I read this as a response to the current hype around LLMs. He is showing computers can solve these issues, without using an LLM architecture. A lot of people have sort of forgot that machine learning is more than just LLMs these days.

I found it to be a very interesting angle.

> He is showing computers can solve these issues, without using an LLM architecture.

Isn't it a LLM he's building though? My very point is that this particular use case could be solved better without building a LLM, now you claim he is not? The description of what he's doing surely makes it sound like it's a (very small) LLM, and personally I'm still on the "if it quacks like a duck" train in life.

> A lot of people have sort of forgot that machine learning is more than just LLMs these days.

Yeah, which I guess if you make my previous comment more concise, is exactly what I state too.

  • Nowhere does he say he built an llm. Hes using a transformer, not an llm.

    • > Nowhere does he say he built an llm. Hes using a transformer, not an llm.

      Please describe what in your mind a "LLM" is exactly, then describe what this person is building. To me this sounds like "He's not building a calculator, he's just building a program that can do addition, minus, multiplication and division and display the results".

      Obviously it's not a Large Language Model, but to me this looks more like a LLM than not, given the architecture he's chosen. But again, maybe I misunderstand?

      7 replies →

Just to be clear: It was well known that you can reach such scores with small models and without an LLM if you train on the task. The author highlights those models himself - e.g. HRM/TRM.

The novelty is more that it works with such a plain transformer and low compute price.