Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

75% Positive

Analyzed from 1400 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#model#cache#models#more#same#routing#ram#prompt#caching#https

Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mark_l_watson•21 minutes ago
I love the wave of new small model releases. Pleasantly surprising that an NVIDIA model runs so well on Apple Silicon using MLX! I was using nemotron-3.5-lightning:30b-mlx with OpenCode on my old (cheap) Mac this morning and no bad experiences except for running slowly.
jmward01•about 2 hours ago
One major consequence of the ramapocalypse, I think, is an even higher focus on small efficient models. I personally believe that the multi-trillion parameter models are fundamentally missing things and the push to smaller, more efficient will drive evolutionary structural changes that will lead to future gains
cootsnuck•44 minutes ago
I would say even without rampocalypse there would still be the strong incentive to innovate at the edge and under more extreme constraints. The incentives are just even stronger now.

I'm looking forward to seeing what types of new things people create over the coming years once there is less obsession with massive unwieldy LLMs. I think the incentives are just too strong to ignore.

schainks•about 2 hours ago
I am literally betting my company on this being true.
itsmeduncan•about 1 hour ago
Me too. I think there are a few waves we can ride here. Let's collaborate?
jmward01•about 1 hour ago
What company? I am 100% focused on this as a concept in my own internal research.
oblio•about 1 hour ago
It's a bad bet, historically.

I'm having an extremely hard time thinking of companies that have prospered due to optimization. Most of them were swept away by hardware advances, instead.

cootsnuck•about 1 hour ago
Betting on innovation continuing to figure out ways to squeeze more out of less has historically been the right move. Look at Apple.

And I'd argue "hardware advances" are more proof of optimization.

somethingweird•about 1 hour ago
Many of the current internet titans started by making things more efficient and accessible. Google for search, Facebook for connecting to people online, Microsoft for working with PCs at a reasonable price, Amazon for buying online as well as AWS. There are examples in other industries as well, Toyota is famous for it for example. There are probably counter examples but efficiency gains can be a huge deciding factor making companies successful.
jmward01•about 1 hour ago
The 1980's US car industry comes to mind. Nearly wiped out because they refused to make efficient vehicles. SpaceX is arguably showing how a rethink towards efficient can take over an entire industry. I am sure there are strong examples in software as well but they aren't coming to mind.

I think when successful, optimization really just means 'finally built right' and people forget the ridiculously inefficient ways before.

hgoel•about 1 hour ago
The headroom for hardware advances is a lot lower now than it has been for most of the industry's existence, when Moore's law held strong. Now we find ourselves limited by cost, physics, fab capacity, and complexity of spinning up more fab capacity.
polymer8563•about 1 hour ago
IBM wants a word
NBJack•about 2 hours ago
I honestly hope to see this across all applications, games, services, operating systems, etc. We've been in a period of wasteful RAM usage for over a decade. Constraints, whatever their origin, can be a good thing.
pjmlp•about 1 hour ago
Same here, back to when algorithms and data structures mattered.
oblio•about 1 hour ago
If China makes half decent RAM I would bet more on things like 128GM of RAM being the default on low spec laptops 10 years from now.

While I do love optimized software, the hardware side, especially for PCs, has been stagnating for way too long. At least now we have a valid use case for doubling available RAM every 2-3 years again.

I had a reasonably beefy Lenovo consumer line laptop that I bought in 2011, 8GBs of RAM. Its screen hinge broke and I couldn't repair it but I'm fairly sure it was otherwise still usable in 2023-24, once the HDD was replaced with an SSD. I think even now entry level laptops are sold with 8GB of RAM.

By comparison a PC from 2000 was utterly unusable in 2012-13.

thehamkercat•about 3 hours ago
> NeMo Switchyard, an open source library for smart routing

> When deployed, NeMo Switchyard can intelligently direct each request to the most capable and suitable model for the job

How do routers like this handle prompt caching when you send the second request?

Sticky models per session? but then the second message of that session won't be sent to a suitable model, and will only be sent to the same model as previous one.

quinncom•about 1 hour ago
Caching should be possible as long as all the models use the same shared cache. The models don't even need to be running on the same server if the shared cache is distributed.

I have a feeling people reading this are thinking that a model router would be used to route between different providers. And in that case, a shared cache would be impossible, although some caching would still be effective. I think, ideally, a router like this is in front of a set of models hosted in one place.

IanCal•about 1 hour ago
How do caches work across models? I would have thought that was very model specific - if not I’ve really misunderstood what’s getting cached.
amluto•about 1 hour ago
Huh?

Prompt caching isn’t about caching the literal text of the prompt. It’s about caching the result of running prefill on the prompt (or, equivalently, the result of generating the prompt one token at a time by autoregressive inference, or some combination of the above in the case of speculative decoding). This is often called the “KV” cache, and it is very model-specific.

eli•about 3 hours ago
I've seen ones that are configurable to pick a trade off point between lower cost (cache stickiness) and routing performance (best model for that turn).

But yeah I'm skeptical all this overhead is worth it.

embedding-shape•about 3 hours ago
The repo is probably a better entrypoint to it, bit more concise description than the press releases: https://github.com/NVIDIA-NeMo/Switchyard (Notably: "Experimental software. Not for production use."). Unclear if they actually want you to deploy it or not, press release says yes, README says no, do with that what you will.

Doesn't seem to mention "cache" in the README nor the docs, but the code has mentions of it (https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ANVIDIA-NeMo%2FSwitchyard+...), I'm not sure what their thinking is there. "Good luck" essentially? Seems to be per-provider at best, but weird position for a routing library to take.

thehamkercat•about 3 hours ago
I personally think it's snake-oil marketing with all these smart-model-routing products/projects

prompt-cache won't work with these

try-working•about 3 hours ago
To keep it simple, forget about routers and imagine you're in Cursor using GPT for a while, reaching a cache of says 200k.

You decide to switch to DeepSeek in the same session via the model picker, and continue as usual. What happens is that the cache for DeepSeek is created with the 200k + the incremental message. After this, cache can be kept warm for both models; two instances of the cache exists, one for GPT and one for DS.

You switch back to GPT. The whole session is sent to the model with the 200k original from GPT and the incremental messages you sent to DS. The 200k is read from cache and the incrementals are new, and then added to the cache.

Let's say every second message you switch between GPT and DS; cache was 200k and each incremental message is 1k. If you kept going with only GPT, cache hit rate would be 200k/(200k+1k) = 99.5%. When you switch between two models with warm cache, hit rate instead becomes 200k/(200k+2k) = 99%.

Model routers work the same way. Keep the cache warm, replicate it in two places. For this reason, when you set up your model pool for routing, you want to keep the model pool small and differentiated.

First principles of model routing: https://try.works/first-principles-of-model-routing

role-model router and protocol: https://github.com/try-works/role-model

note: edited to keep the answer to the below message clearer

average_bloke•about 2 hours ago
I would like to propose something:

- problem: massive deluge of information because of AI

- solution: human beings should adopt a minimalist style of communicating in writing.

- e.g. this entire website page can be ten bullet points.

fooker•about 1 hour ago
k
stavros•about 1 hour ago
While I agree with the spirit, I don't think the solution to bad prose is slightly less bad prose. We can write good prose instead.
encrux•about 2 hours ago
In my opinion: the only way forward is zero-knowledge-proof authenticated social media.

We can’t have legitimate debate if we have to assume a few bad actors are cloning their voice by the thousands, poisoning debate.

If we can pin one account to a real person, we won’t get rid of LLM-content and misinformation, but at least we can hold them accountable.

ttoinou•about 2 hours ago
Is the network based on trust and peer to peer confirmation of private keys from who you know in real life that you validated isn’t a robot ?

Or do you have something else in mind ?

kubelsmieci•about 2 hours ago
> We can’t have legitimate debate

I'm not sure people really want that

docheinestages•about 1 hour ago
They conveniently decided not to include the Qwen range of models in the Artificial Analysis graph, except the out-of-league Max variant. At least be brave and honest.
jadbox•about 1 hour ago
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning runs on how little GPU vram? Can q4 run on 16gb?
WalterGR•about 3 hours ago
24 comments so far about Nemotron on this earlier submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49257947
XCSme•about 3 hours ago
The new Meta 30B models seems A LOT better:

https://aibenchy.com/compare/meta-muse-glimmer-30b-xhigh/nvi...

thehamkercat•about 2 hours ago
Muse Glimmer 30B seems to be on par with Qwen 3.6 27B (4 months old)

but

Qwen 3.8 27B is dropping this week...

XCSme•about 2 hours ago
Yes, I was surprised to see doing it as well as Qwen 3.7 27b.

Even though that model is already "old", qwen was way ahead everyone else in that size category before this Meta model.

Also, probably for non-Chinese usage, using a non-Chinese model might lead to better results.

rllearneratwork•about 1 hour ago
and Glimmer has 10x active params of Lightning. Meaning ~ 10 slower on same HW
eli•about 2 hours ago
The top 4 models on that site are all variants of Gemini Flash? That does not match my experience at all.
XCSme•about 2 hours ago
I should add a F.a.q. for this question.

The suite is across many categories, not only coding, and most of the tasks are low-horizon (or what the opposite of long-horizon is), where the max thinking time is around 10 minutes.

Gemini models are really smart, unfortunately they don't play well with any harness, so hard to use in practice.

But try them out for one-shot tasks, they are really good. Don't use them for coding in a harness, but you can ask them to generate code/planning (still, for coding only other models are indeed recommended).

markasoftware•about 1 hour ago
yep, the person you're responding to created the benchmark and is using HN comments as advertisement.
khimaros•about 1 hour ago
lightning is sparse, glimmer is dense
Tactical45•about 3 hours ago
At what cost difference?
XCSme•about 2 hours ago
I don't think it matters, if it's for local/on-device usage.

The cost is similar vram footprint I guess (?)