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They need some of that fluff to keep up the illusion of intelligence and sycophancy that gets people to rely on them. Additionally, they need to make sure they don't prune so much that the model size seems manageable on consumer or standard business hardware, otherwise more people may become tempted to self-host a distilled or other semi-open model. The model size is also a marketing point.
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Or would it be worse as it wouldn’t have the broader knowledge to understand the reason you’re coding what you are anyway, understand the logs and iterate?

Coding an exercise app will benefit from a model that can code and understands what exercise is. A car showroom website will benefit from a model that understands what relevant filters would be.

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Of course there are synergies between different fields. I'm not saying cutting everything off as close as possible to it's purpose must be the best way. But that's a long way from a single generalized model.
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> not saying cutting everything off as close as possible to it's purpose must be the best way

Nah, let’s stand firm here and not give in so easily. Parent suggests a coding model needs exercise info in case you want to code an exercise model? Absurd, that leads to the know everything monolith to do anything.

Language, reasoning, tool use, and domain knowledge.. in this case the domain is coding. Someone wants an exercise app? Great, so we look that shit up, we don’t bake it in. We don’t want to bake anything we don’t need in.

We don’t even need to explain this completely reasonable and totally normal engineering preference that small is beautiful. it’s the other side that needs to justify wtf exercise has to do with coding or why everything from twitter posts to a working knowledge of 15th century French poetry just might be helpful for disconnected domains, like say serious work in contemporary astrophysics. Back to basics, No one asked for that, No one should accept as given that this is the way anything needs to work

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> Parent suggests a coding model needs exercise info in case you want to code an exercise model?

No, the point is having broader knowledge than just "can code" is important for building software for humans to use.

> We don’t even need to explain this completely reasonable and totally normal engineering preference that small is beautiful.

It is, of course it is, as long as that small thing is useful. My argument is not "let's put literally everything in this thing just in case" it's "broader world knowledge is important for building many things".

Also, we don't look at CVs or histories of people and say "hmm, this person could be good at coding for us but I really wish they didn't have such a broad and expansive history".

> Great, so we look that shit up

But what do you have it look up? What is exercise? What is a muscle and what is a human? How is it going to understand those references? Does it have the broad enough understanding to see where the gaps are?

At some level unless all you want is "loop over the array and sum the results into a variable called sales_total" converted into code, you have to have some broader knowledge about things.

And once you start considering that maybe it needs more than simply code, we're not disagreeing we're just discussing where the line should be. Which I've also not placed, because there's no simple statement to make on that.

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> Also, we don't look at CVs or histories of people and say "hmm, this person could be good at coding for us but I really wish they didn't have such a broad and expansive history".

Damn right we don't say that. And I don't look at a carpenter and wonder if his head is hard enough to drive nails like a hammer either. People aren't tools, and tools aren't people. You've conflated them because they are both capable of doing work. And that's exactly the type of confusion and category error that the perspective I'm arguing against will lead to.

Wanting a multipurpose tool or system is occasionally reasonable. Much more often it is very, very to close misunderstanding the nature of a problem, what a tool is, or what a system should be. The particulars of purpose and mechanism of action matter, which is why a blowtorch is sometimes a wrench but only if you're kind of desperate. It is always a very scandalous thing to speak ill of someone's best new electric banana-phone / dishwasher-piano that they want to sell you. But that just sounds messy to me, I'm not sure it will improve the sound quality or taste of anything involved.

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Isn't this just the Bitter Lesson over and over again? Specialised approaches get outperformed by more compute and a simpler general approach pretty much every time.
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Bitter lesson is wrong. Large general models are outperformed by small specialized models.
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Which is the way it is in life. You need a specialist. when you need to see a doctor, an engineer, a builder, a lawyer, etc, etc the world of AI will be the same. You need a specialist, a model that can focus on exactly what you need and not be cluttered up with what you don’t need.

That might mean that spending all that money on that giant master of none model might lose out to the much smaller specialist model, uh-oh…

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The Bitter Lesson makes no distinction between large general models and small specialized models, assuming they are both trained from data.

The Bitter Lesson is that human-written rule models will always lose out to trained models in the end.

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