Open-weights world models' parameter size doubles every ~6 months | Hacker News Reader

Open-weights world models' parameter size doubles every ~6 months

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16 pointskaarelson9 comments

Is it me or is that not what that graph shows? That line has ~no relation to the datapoints it's purporting to be a fit for.

True.

Correct, the line is not fitted to n=27 data points. It simply connects the highest params size between 2023 and 2026. To clarify, I wouldn't expect traditional research groups to pre-train anything >3B params WM, because this can't be done on a single GPU anymore. Just wanted to ship this as quickly as possible. Happy to do a follow-up with an actual log-scale linear regression, though.

It almost would feel like a fair graph, but it's also below that one ~outlier in the middle. So it's ignoring all data but two points and purporting to fit an exponential to it. That's within spitting distance of meaningless, right?

There's an infinite number of exponentials that fit the same two points just as well, and way more non-exponentials too.

thanks, noted for next time!

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I would be more interested the cost of each model in hardware resources to achieve 1 token per second.

Cost is a metric of interest these days.

The cost is an extremely nonlinear function of the speed expressed in tokens per second.

Throughputs of around 1 token per second can be achieved even for the biggest currently existing open-weights models with a mini-PC with 2 internal M.2 SSDs, which by the beginning of this year would have cost around $1200, though now it probably costs more than this, because the prices of DRAM & SSDs have continued to escalate.

It would be possible to increase the speed about 4 times for a double cost, while still running the model from SSDs in a desktop with extra SSDs in an add-on card, in a 16-lane PCIe 5.0 slot.

Then to increase more the speed you would have to fit all the weights in DRAM, and at the current prices 1 TB or 2 TB of DRAM in a server computer would increase the cost more than one order of magnitude.

For more speed, the weights must fit inside the GPU memory, which would bring again a cost increase of more than 1 order of magnitude.

So the cost per token per second is meaningless due to the great non-linearity of the cost, as a function of both model size in GByte and of throughput in tokens per second.

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