Comment by tchalla
20 hours ago
Anyone who has worked in ML for 10+ years would already know that the usage of LLMs for everything is lazy, wasteful and a high degree of marketing on it.
20 hours ago
Anyone who has worked in ML for 10+ years would already know that the usage of LLMs for everything is lazy, wasteful and a high degree of marketing on it.
Anyone who has designed circuits will consider CPUs wasteful compared to ASICs. This new FPGA technology is just a less efficient ASIC.
That’s roughly what I’m hearing.
The fact that general purpose intelligent classifiers can be dynamically hacked together by an LLM in real time to allow them to build evolving labeled and understandable networks that perform substantially faster than the LLM, and can act as an intermediate sorting and organizing layer for caching context or handling simple tasks, and a complete layman like me can assemble a teachable layer of these in a few days from an inexpensive service…
That’s wild!
And then you can identify where an expert system needs a more specific ML technique for efficiency within this network that overlays the SOTA model. Or manually adjust the stored context in each secondary “neuron”. And paths forward can run programs or take actions at relative high speed.
And you can share these with others and improve them as a group.
You could insert this at the datacenters at scale with a local supervising expert to prune and encourage proper growth. You could identify specific gaps in capability that need more training, and patch over them temporarily.
Then you train those corrections back into the general purpose model, or you identify highly efficient subsystems for specific purposes.
And this is just one way to use it. High speed intelligent workflows can live in this. There’s a spot for a local LLM to learn on the fly.
Maybe I’m way off base, but for the non-experts Jev seems extremely valuable.
That's the thing. LLM's can be used as a real-time teaching layer and build systems that can operate at deterministic speeds and escape hatch into a LLM when confidence levels drop. This approach has helped us save more than $1 Million annually against the straight LLM classifiers at scale (and pass that on to the customers)
https://sureshsubasinghe.substack.com/p/how-to-cut-agent-llm...
https://sureshsubasinghe.substack.com/p/the-god-model-fallac...
Also all of the mobile/embedded/resource constrained environments. Like sure my phone can run an LLM but it’s going to be bad and drain my battery.
I don't think either of you are wrong. The parent's assertion is that we've known this for almost a decade. BERT was highly usable for classification and sentiment analysis a whopping 9 years ago, despite being less than 0.5B parameters large. Similar-scale models like FLAN-T5 showed that it could be improved without substantially scaling up.
Today, we're extremely spoiled by trillion parameter-scale models. Our conceptualization of vibe coding relies on wasteful tool-calling paradigms, the one-size-fits-all mentality of LLMs is part of the marketing blitz to make people buy more tokens. It's lazy on the part of frontier labs, but also wastes electricity, time and money.
Lol your argument is the same as programmers who complain about Javascript and internet browsers being the most common interface for all solutions on a computer
You guys dont understand that the Lowest common denominator ALWAYS wins - its why excel is the linga franca for most companies
LLMS and AI coding are the new javascript easy way to build amazing things and that trumps the tool specializers
Years of Big Data and Data Engineers building fit for purpose ML pipelines expensively working in a shadowy corner of the company have been replaced by the PM vibe coding a tool to categorize his emails by relevance
5 replies →
Dude, this is gold!
FPGA's are definitely not new. They've been mainstream for 20 odd years+.
See https://www.eetimes.com/fpga-market-to-pass-2-7-billion-by-1...
I would rate using LLM for tasks more specific ML can handle as a lot like using one's smartphone to snap photos, listen to music, set alarms, and play video games in preference to carrying around a fun cam, ipod, watch, and switch 2 everywhere.
For those who need to dive really deep into each specific avenue and squeeze maximal quality out, the photographers will be packing DSLRs and intense gamers will wait til they get home to strap into a PS5 or a gaming rig or VR or whatever.
But "can get 90% of anyone's needs met in this field, and can do the same in dozens or hundreds of other fields simultaneously" will remain the killer solution for anyone with lots needs that each have bounded depth.
I prototyped an NLP pipeline using an LLM because setting up the whole NLP skeleton was way too much of a pain. It was able to adequately simulate each piece. The nice part was that I could attack the problem from above, at any point I could just have the full intelligence of the LLM at my disposal.
I have, LLMs are less fragile, that’s why I like them. The ability to generalize isn’t just about being general purpose, it’s super robust, and so assuming the budget is there (I agree they are inefficient) end up performing better on many classical tasks that have ood inputs. Before LLMs / foundation models we all struggled with generalization and at least in the work I was doing people were independently converging to using bigger more general models for tasks anyway as compute got cheaper. LLMs are just the most popular version of this.
> The ability to generalize isn’t just about being general purpose, it’s super robust
I work with LLMs daily. 5 of my specialized tasks are outperformed by a custom model than a general purpose frontier model. The performance of my custom models not only beat them but are orders of magnitude low in costs and thus are able to be used by more customers.
I suspect you and GP are talking at different layers. I think you are using robust on specific tasks with measurable confusion matrix. I think GP is talking about robust in more complex and diverse workflows, with the ability to self correct over turns.
Either, please correct me if I'm misinterpreting
That's part of the irony here I guess. In specialized fields, think computer vision, there were lots of teams whose innovative state of the art model was essentially just a function of the limitless compute they could throw at the problem. Now there are just people with even bigger sticks.
There are lots of scenarios where specialized models still are the only option for real time, power efficiency, and so on. And transformers and other tech behind LLMs can equally produce better specialized models. But no sympathy for those who confused compute with innovation.
I wouldn’t say lazy, LLMs are fast to use and much more cost effective especially if you factor the cost and time of training (data preparation, data cleaning, … etc).
It’s hard to justify several months to business when there is something off-shelf ready to use and doesn’t require domain specialists to run.
People have been having this same debate in a very similar way on typed languages vs untyped interpreted languages. I think that, in a similar vein, if you look at the trend over time:
- the addition and standardization (with incomplete coverage) of the solution of adding typing to Python
- how much people are re-discovering the value of performance + typing (e.g. Rust)
then I'm going to take a small leap and extrapolate that the trend will be similar here.
The equivalent of the "one off script in python" will be the LLM, and the long term stable and maintainable solution will be something much more structured and focused like Jev.
In other words, the "Bitter Lesson" (the famous essay)?
I thought one core result that led to LLMs was the realization that a specialized model is not necessarily better at a task than a general one.
That goes all the way back to at least to Stein's Paradox in 1955, sadly too few people get educated about Statistics and keep thinking specialized models will necessarily be better. If you want to estimate the batting averages of 3 MLB baseball players from samples, you are better off building a model to predict all of their batting averages than computing the mean from a sample of each one separately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stein%27s_example
Agreed... that said, humans will happily do something wasteful for a very long time if it's easier than the alternative.
why would you waste your time messing around with a team of expensive ml engineers and data scientists that produce vastly inferior to a llm.
We ripped out custom homegrown ml models that were developed in last 10 yrs and put an llm in its place. Its the opposite of wasteful. Even local gemma models are vastly superior.
There’s a middle option. Once you figure that out, you’d soon understand my point today or tomorrow. I’ve been in this field for 21 years and I use LLMs everyday. I also know when to not use them.
It's the transportation "mode shifting" difficulty. Per the AI, the term of art is "Pure Transfer Penalty". It's the "ick" when doing bike => bus => bike instead of "only bike" or "only car".
Mode switching has a cost. Usually std::sort is good enough compared to picking the prime optimal algorithm for your expected shape. Just call the function and get on with your day.
I think both your arguments are true. It all depends on the velocity of the capability growth and the fact that opportunity cost is expensive.
Once we get out of this hypergriwth phase the very same AI companies that now are giving you llms will provide a service that employed a rich mixture of optimized models that will reduce the operational costs to achieve the required results
I'm a little confused: LLMs were invented in 2018.
Is the middle option asking LLM to generate a classic ML model? Or generate tons of them and pick the best?
Anyone who has worked in ML for 10+ years has heard of the Bitter Lesson, and doesn't want to be its next poster child.
This is why you shouldn't assume that my comment was a juxtaposition of LLMs in comparison with hand crafted feature ML models. The binary thinking is highly problematic IMO