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#model#models#open#training#more#frontier#better#thinking#kimi#don

Discussion (120 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

GodelNumbering•about 2 hours ago
This is the golden age of model training. Some days ago, I decided I wanted a local CPU only model that can perform exceptionally well for English to Bash translation (to avoid the googling for command syntax). I got a bunch of subagents to generate large amount of training data (140k+ samples), got the Qwen 3 0.6B base model, pointed Astra at it, and off to the races. It trained for 2 days (on and off) and I got a surprisingly good model for my task! The total active time I spent was a few hours. And it is still improving, what a time to be alive!
amelius•about 1 hour ago
I don't understand. If you have a model that can do bash examples already (your subagents), then why would you need to train a model?

Or are the subagents generating your training data using a closed/paid model?

Aurornis•about 1 hour ago
A very small, highly specialized model can use negligible resources (CPU, energy) to accomplish the same task.

For everyday work that happens frequently it's better to have a tiny specialized model instead of making billable API calls or turning your laptop into an 80W space heater for 20 seconds to run a general purpose model.

The large models can be used to generate synthetic training data. Tell them to make up 100,000 tasks paired with the resulting output as a 1-time cost. Then use that to train a small model.

Think of it as distillation, but focused on a specific task.

jamienk•7 minutes ago
This is so cool - I'm aware of this in a vague way. Can you write a little tutorial or give some good links. I want this to be the next new things I do :)
nearbuy•27 minutes ago
Given that they're just using it to avoid the googling for bash command syntax, I'm not sure they'll save in the end against the 140k training examples they generated.
computerex•about 1 hour ago
The models he is using to generate training data are presumably commercial models. He is distilling their bash knowledge into a much smaller model he can run locally fast and cheap.
luisfmh•about 1 hour ago
Curious about how you generated the training data? Was it just asking an existing model to generate a bunch of examples?

I ask cause would this be a kind of model distillation?

I have a small model I'm looking to train on some data, and I have some real live data but I'd love to be able to extend it.

GodelNumbering•about 1 hour ago
All synthetic data. For this usecase, it was easier because all current generation LLMs, even the small models, are really good at bash commands (and SQL queries too)), so you can reasonably start batches of cheap subagents whose output is reviewed by a more capable model and merge into main training set. After 100k, I had to standing instructions to run the generation loops selectively, meaning only update samples in a given area where we see poor capability.
toasty228•about 1 hour ago
It is a form of distillation, as long as you're working a very narrow "trivial" topics it works perfectly.
equinumerous•about 1 hour ago
That's a really impressive result. There are all kinds of small tasks like this I use an LLM for, but theoretically if you broke all the sub-use cases into local-only models, and had something lightweight that routed to the right model, you could have faster and cheaper workflows. E.g. something trained on the linux man pages for common commands, since it's usually quicker to ask an LLM for a specific command with flags than to consult the man pages.
dominotw•29 minutes ago
> That's a really impressive result.

we dont know what the result is and how its impressive.

xhevahir•17 minutes ago
> what a time to be alive!

It's good to hear you're enjoying yourself, but I suggest retiring that expression. It's really beginning to grate.

okamiueru•21 minutes ago
Golden age before the age that ends humanity. Not talking about any "rogue AI", just the known statistical models of what is coming due to climate change.
teeskay•37 minutes ago
If it’s one of thing that you want just for English to bash shell commands, I will create AST, it is deterministic, exceptionally fast, no tokens so no need to fine tune existing model, please let me know your thoughts.
shriphani•about 2 hours ago
what hardware are you using to train?
GodelNumbering•about 2 hours ago
I didn't have a local GPU, so I asked it to go out and find hardware. It found a google TPU v6e which seemed reasonably priced. I gave it my google api key. I told it to use TPU only when training and bring it down afterwards. That's about it.
libria•about 1 hour ago
> I gave it my google api key

This is the part where the narrator looks at the camera and says "Don't try this at home, kids!"

otterley•about 2 hours ago
What kind of observability did you have over this process? I’m interested in how my peers are operating these efforts.
varispeed•about 1 hour ago
> I told it to use TPU only when training and bring it down afterwards.

I wouldn't put my house on it. Brave.

shriphani•about 2 hours ago
Neat!
torginus•16 minutes ago
Sorry for the aside, but I noticed half the usecase of AI is fixing the awful DX.
PEe9bB7D•about 2 hours ago
i also need more info!
GodelNumbering•about 2 hours ago
I am thinking about opensourcing everything, although this is not my main domain or my main startup, so the overhead of huggingface etc seems a bit unnecessary

Edit: will do as soon as possible

jack_pp•about 1 hour ago
just ask the agent to write it up if you don't have time to do a write-up yourself
equinumerous•about 1 hour ago
+1, would like to see. Even if it's not fully "ready for consumption", it's probably enough to reproduce the results.
jjice•about 1 hour ago
Please do! Small, specialized models need more love and the time you spent would be a gift!
atombender•about 1 hour ago
Would also love to read a write-up about this!
tukHelix•20 minutes ago
It’s the first time I know fireworks has a team doing model research. I do have a complex mood in that. On one hand, I’m always happy to see improvement of OSS models, whether that’s on intelligence or cost-efficiency. On the other hand, I would be a little worried about using fireworks as my API provider. Till the moment I saw this news, I had been using fireworks as my provider of deepseek v4 flash, because I thought fireworks acting as a role deploying OSS models and selling calculation resources, should be safe to use without worry of data being used for training since there’s no “conflict of interests”. But I would think twice now.
slim•5 minutes ago
That also could explain why openrouter is worth that much
owl_might_•11 minutes ago
netvarun•about 2 hours ago
Off topic:With sol pricing drop tbh kimi k3’s value prop has not been that great. For our internal use case/testing/benchmarks sol come out with way better quality and much cheaper costs. Kimi really needs to drop their pricing (I heard it’s set by them across all the neoclouds) Sol is at 2/10 vs kimi’s 3/15
pornel•about 1 hour ago
Competition is good. Without K3/GLM/DS4 etc. there would be no pressure on OpenAI to drop Sol's price.
drob518•about 2 hours ago
Agreed. Even on the open weight side, GLM 5.3 has roughly equivalent performance to Kimi K3 for less than half the cost.
nicce•28 minutes ago
Sol pricing dropped but so did the quality few days ago. I wonder when these companies are sued for making the terms from their side to go downwards while taking the same subscription cost.
solarkraft•25 minutes ago
Is anybody tracking these quality changes? All I've seen so far are accusations (quite a few at this point) but not really any actual data.
pupppet•15 minutes ago
I don’t understand how there isn’t a website out there tracking this stuff already.
nicce•20 minutes ago
In a Codex subreddit there is a bunch of stats.
LatticeAnimal•20 minutes ago
6-Sol has been (in my experience) terrible. I can't explain why, but it just feels like a weird combination of too dumb and too change-happy (like the old 2024/2025 models).

5.6-Sol and 6-Astra have been worlds better for the tasks I've had them do.

nostrebored•about 2 hours ago
Agreed, I think the only place where it’s still interesting is ui design. Visually kimi and muse feel much nicer than frontier models to me, but maybe it’s an artifact of everything terrible being Claude Design
7777777phil•about 1 hour ago
I was surprised by that. I run my benchmark [1] every couple of days and was sure this model will be ath the pareto frontier, if not THE pareto frontier. But no:

Ember isn't picked yet. In planning, Opus 5.5 wins under the planning weights. In code, GPT-6 Sol dominates it: also 10/10, but with a higher quality score and a lower estimated cost. Ember has no intelligence index, so its starting score is only 0.73, which holds its 10/10 down to 0.954 against Sol's 0.975.

[1] https://philippdubach.com/posts/jev-model-router-for-pi/

toasty228•about 1 hour ago
> With sol pricing drop

6 or 5.6? Because 6 is hot garbage

nxtfari•14 minutes ago
The more I learn about Fireworks the more unsavory they seem as a company. I don’t care what the license says, Moonshot has been openly improving, sharing research, and providing weights for the models that make up your entire bottom line, and the moment you can improve them in reciprocal it’s closed weights, “this is our own proprietary” nonsense? Where are we that China has better open source ethos than America?
peri-cl•4 minutes ago
Why is proprietary-licensed software unethical?

Kimi K3 itself isn't FOSS. Speaking of reciprocity: Fireworks is presumably paying Moonshot serious money for the right to do what they are doing here, since Kimi's free-tier license[0] excludes large companies (such as Fireworks). It requires them to: "...enter into a separate agreement with Moonshot AI before using the Software or its derivative works..."

[0] https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE#...

jamienk•about 3 hours ago
Ignoring for the moment issues of what "counts" as open, won't open models rapidly advance due to stuff like this in ways that it's less possible for the proprietary ones to do? This is exactly how Linux & Wikipedia, for example, overtook their "frontiers", right?
andsoitis•about 2 hours ago
> Ignoring for the moment issues of what "counts" as open, won't open models rapidly advance due to stuff like this in ways that it's less possible for the proprietary ones to do? This is exactly how Linux & Wikipedia, for example, overtook their "frontiers", right?

I suspect the advantage that catapulted Linux ahead of the establishment was less technical potential and talent and more organizational advantage. That's not to diminish the technical talent of the Linux crew, but them being unencumbered gave them more degrees of freedom. The rest is history.

So as long as the AI companies don't succumb to "big company" dynamics, they can outlead. To wit: Open AI and Anthropic are kicking Google's ass.

mirekrusin•about 1 hour ago
I think people make mistake here, google’s approach is not to spend $2.3 on every $1.0 earned, they’re riding on serving to masses “luna”, they absolutely have way more powerful models internally but they don’t clutter their infrastructure with fragile and costly intelligence-of-size inference frontier. I think “underdog” perception is illusory/temporary, not stupidity - calculated, conscious, longer term bet.
jamienk•about 2 hours ago
Diff people have diff motives to experiment, then new work is done on top of stuff that "hits" in a way no one anticipated. Then work gets piled on top in a way that might make it hard to port
andsoitis•about 2 hours ago
> then new work is done on top of stuff that "hits" in a way no one anticipated.

Indeed. And when you have freedom to play, you are able to find new stepping stones that you didn't anticipate. And you can combine stepping stones in new ways to make new discoveries.

Greatness cannot be planned.

segmondy•about 2 hours ago
No, because close labs/models borrow but don't contribute back.
ssivark•about 1 hour ago
This was exactly the crux of Nathan Lambert's recent testimony to a group of US Congressional members/staff: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/the-current-balance-of-power-...
swagatkonchada•about 2 hours ago
Won't the "frontier" labs figure out whatever techniques were used and apply them to their closed models?
cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago
Like how the last 2 decades of tech companies are thinly veiled open source pilfering into business units.
k__•about 2 hours ago
If they can keep up.

The lock-in is less pronounced as it is with AWS or MS.

zeroq•about 2 hours ago
The difference between contributing to OS and AI, is that the first is a hobby alternative to woodworking or hiking, while the other can easily bootstrap you a company you can get millions in investment, at least for time being.
intothemild•about 2 hours ago
Yes, absolutely, but only if people keep contributing in the open.
jack_pp•about 2 hours ago
not necessarily, just knowing something is possible will motivate others to achieve it somehow. Which is why there are so many LLMs and OAI doesn't have a monopoly
tangled•35 minutes ago
What am I missing here? I think of fireworks as an inference provider serving open weights model. The value that they primarily provide to customers is that (i) they improve reliability by balancing across a bunch of clouds/neoclouds, (ii) they get better pricing by buying capacity in bulk, and (iii) they reduce operational costs. So far so good.

I can also see the argument for providing a post-training service from a customer acquisition perspective: "hey, we can fine-tune this open weights model, so it both gives better/more predictable results than OpenAI/Anthropic and also is cheaper. And btw, once we've won your business, please run this model on our infra."

But what I'm struggling to understand is fireworks spending a bunch of money (on salaries and compute) releasing a frontier model that is going to rapidly fall behind the frontier. Is this "just" advertising for them, both for customers and also for hiring? Or are they actually trying to stay on the frontier? If so, to what end?

criemen•26 minutes ago
> to what end?

I'd expect that their business strategy is to compete in more markets, and if successful, they can capture more value. This is the "easiest" for them as they already have GPUs, a training environment etc. For that platform it's not the worst if there's an internal customer team that can help shape the future and provide immediate feedback, and if it results in a good model, even better.

Other things I'd not be surprised they offer in the future in the same vein: A multi-model harness, coding agent (cloud and local), and maybe at a later point in time even a CPU-only cloud compute product.

danielmarkbruce•28 minutes ago
The end: make lots of money. The means: systematically take existing reasoning models, do some more post-training of some sort to make them achieve the same outputs with less reasoning tokens (ie, cheaper). Same quality but cheaper is always valuable.

It's unclear if they can do this systematically and it's unclear if they can do it better than others. But, lots of things are unclear in AI at the moment, this doesn't seem outrageous on the surface. And, it could just be marketing. And it could be the first option with the backup of the second.

TomasEkeli•33 minutes ago
I think they are trying to show potential customers what is possible.
Arcuru•about 1 hour ago
Over on /r/LocalLLaMA there's a group that's been getting popular doing the same thing for the Qwen 27B (and other) models. - https://huggingface.co/ukisai
nico•about 2 hours ago
> The problem: thinking models think too much

This is partly the appeal of Jev et al; having a quick model for simple tasks, that doesn’t require that much thinking

It’s amazing all the workflows that models like that can unlock. And yes, classifiers and other ML models have been around for a while for these types of tasks, but Jev has made it easy and cheap to play and experiment. This in turn, is incentivizing people to try them for a bunch of stuff, unlocking creativity and producing a lot of new cool (and eventually potentially very useful) applications

demibabs•about 2 hours ago
What are the useful applications of Jev so far? Not to sound dismissive, I just haven’t seen what people are using it for yet.
vulture916•26 minutes ago
Here's a third-party (not Jev) showcase of things people built, which helped me kind of get the appeal. https://bentossell.com/jev/ (not mine).
neosat•about 2 hours ago
Lots of use cases! I've personally used it for the following:

1. Evals (once you have your rubric defined and tuned using a reasoning model, jev can be great for running periodic evals especially those that run daily.

2. e-commerce catalog classification 3. quick search using anything as context and query mapping to a pre-defined set.

computerex•40 minutes ago
At least for 1, evils, you’d want to use a good old reasoning model to get the best eval results.
elcomet•about 2 hours ago
Why not using a cheap LLM with thinking completely disabled ? I don't think it will be much more expensive than jev.
ssivark•about 1 hour ago
LLM inference has two very different regimes of work: prefill & decode. You can think of the former roughly as processing a pre-specified prompt, and the latter as sequential processing (auto-regressive token generation) eg. "chain of thought". The latter is very important for LLMs and cannot be ignored; it deeply influences infra design, even necessitates copious amounts of high-bandwidth memory. Jev-like models can ignore the latter and therefore optimize much better for the former, consequently operating at both better cost and latency.
nico•about 1 hour ago
I’ve tested this with some local LLMs and their accuracy is in general better than Jev/Laya, but they are super slow in comparison as well

For example, a typical/stock LLM can’t really play Doom in real time, but a Jev-like model can. Just because of latency

Of course, if you want the best Doom player, there are way better and faster adhoc models

spdustin•30 minutes ago
Been thinking about the feasibility of training a model using synthetic thinking traces that were reduced to caveman-speak prior to being used for training. Seems like it would be fairly easy to generate plenty of suitably lobotomized synthetic traces with a pair of cheap-ish models. Or even just using good old fashioned NLP to aggressively remove stop words and reduce trace words to lemmas.
andsoitis•about 3 hours ago
> The problem: thinking models think too much

Analysis paralysis stifles not just human intelligence, but other intelligences too.

minimaxir•about 1 hour ago
The thinking traces on some Chinese models just output the full response in the thinking trace, then output it again to the user, which is redundant.
AraneaDev•about 2 hours ago
Yes and thar makes you wonder if the Paradox of Choice would apply as well ;)

The more options you have, the harder it becomes to be satisfied with the one you picked.

intothemild•about 2 hours ago
So they trained a model on open weights, and then aren't releasing the weights... am I reading this right?
netvarun•about 2 hours ago
Technically kimi k-3 weights license is not open weight (it has a lot of restrictions). I would classify it as ‘weight open’ similar to the bsl and fsl ’source open’ licenses.
Evidlo•about 2 hours ago
weight available
DonsDiscountGas•about 2 hours ago
It happens. Most open licenses aren't GPL style copyleft.
kingstnap•about 2 hours ago
There is little to no point reading the article as well. It's stripped of all alpha.

> task and environment feedback

> on-policy planning and learning

> feedback connects decisions to their consequences

These are deliberately the least informative phrases you could possibly use to describe what you have done, while still being in the realm of words that go over a generic investor who has no idea whats going on and may be dazzled by sciencey sounding language.

Cursor compose 2.5 article where they used and described on policy self distilation was actual alpha.

intothemild•4 minutes ago
This is precisely my point.
makeramen•about 2 hours ago
Aren't Cursor Composer models like this too? At some point all the extra RL you do can be considered as proprietary information added.

Not suggesting this is right or wrong, but is sort of the nature of the technology.

swagatkonchada•about 2 hours ago
It happens with open source software all the time, why would we expect any different with open source weights.
otterley•about 2 hours ago
Because the licenses that apply to software make no sense in the context of LLMs. With the latter, there is no source code to license.

The words of a license are what the license is.

reactordev•about 2 hours ago
Because we do. The GPL isn't a suggestion. If you can take open source code and make private software out of it then what are we all doing? No, license requirements and agreement are law for a reason.
bloggie•about 2 hours ago
Kimi K3 has its own license which is permissive, it isn't at all like GPL https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE
dgellow•37 minutes ago
GPL is a specific license, it’s not FLOSS as a whole
dgellow•38 minutes ago
Which is fine, that’s legal according to the license
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srameshc•about 1 hour ago
> The problem: thinking models think too much

I see that with Opus 5, it started thinking like crazy in the last few days , I don't think my workflow is that complicated, still it gets into thinking mode and stays there

tomrod•about 3 hours ago
Well done, and great iteration.

The pareto frontier needs clearer distinction. Benchmarks miss half the story. What, if any, capability is lost by the token reduction (for example, was it like super awesome at Golang before and now kind of sucks? that kind of distinction).

drob518•about 2 hours ago
Unfortunately, it’s hard to make a chart of that.
riquito•about 1 hour ago
Aside. I find the "cost per task" charts both useful and uncanny. Is It better a model that takes me to 90% in 1 dollar or one that takes me to 95% in 2 dollars? Or a different model that too scores 90% in 1 dollar? How much will it cost me the last 10% or 5%? At the end of the day, cost to 100% is what matters and the half (90%) backed solution may require more to reach 100% (or not, who knows?)
swiftcoder•44 minutes ago
> Is It better a model that takes me to 90% in 1 dollar or one that takes me to 95% in 2 dollars?

It's pretty important to understand if your own work domain is one where the last 5% matters. In a lot of day-to-day software engineering tasks, it doesn't, and one can get crazy mileage out of the cheaper models. OTOH, if you are performing novel research, that last 5% may be worth whatever it costs...

erichocean•about 3 hours ago
Need this done for DeepSeek, ideally one of the Flash models.
drob518•about 2 hours ago
And GLM. Both Deepseek 4.1 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash are quote verbose when thinking.
atemerev•about 3 hours ago
If you have the compute, I have the expertise.
blissofbeing•about 1 hour ago
Would be nice to include in fire pass.
tdhz77•about 3 hours ago
Does anybody know if this would be a good model for creative writing?
combobyte•about 1 hour ago
> model

> creative

Choose one.

dbuxton•about 2 hours ago
Do they mean Opus 5.5 or Opus 5?
themgt•about 2 hours ago
The result? Ember-1 set a new Pareto frontier for Bedside Bench across both open and closed models including GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, and Claude Opus 5 on cost/task.

"Pareto": 8 hits

"Opus 5.5": zero hits

wmf•about 2 hours ago
Obviously this research was done before 6.0 Sol and Opus 5.5 came out. Your point stands that the frontier moves quickly and small gains can be eclipsed quickly.
ls612•about 3 hours ago
On the smaller end, Quen 3.8, while being extraordinarily capable for a small local model, also suffers from extreme thinking. I wonder if the techniques described here generalize to other models too.
spijdar•about 2 hours ago
I suspect it might generalize to other large models, but I don't think Qwen3.8 27B is one of them. Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion parameter model, and I suspect that is playing a big role in being able to reduce the length of CoT without taking a hit in quality.

That's just vibes, though.

monkey_monkey•about 3 hours ago
I don't think the article mentions Pareto frontier enough.

Also, did I miss a memo? Suddenly every article on AI seems to be talking about the Pareto frontier - or have I just not been paying attention?

intothemild•5 minutes ago
Is there a Pareto frontier for the number of times articles mention or don't mention a Pareto frontier.
user43928•about 2 hours ago
Pareto frontier on some benchmark that I am hearing of for the first time.

Kimi K3 with less reasoning tokens isn't exactly exciting either, and particularly so if the license is less open than original Kimi K3.

AnodicElegy•about 2 hours ago
I guess they figure "best bang for your buck" comes off a little too colloquial.
swiftcoder•42 minutes ago
I would really love if we brought back some colloquialisms in this field. Not that long ago most folks in tech would have had pretty blank looks on their faces when someone started talking about the "Pareto frontier"
alienbaby•37 minutes ago
when everyones fighting to be 'somewhere in the pile' they need some way to advertise they have made progress while not being the best.
DonsDiscountGas•about 2 hours ago
They want it to be the best at something. And it's obviously not the absolute smartest. So here we are.
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logicallee•about 2 hours ago
This is really interesting. I think the Fireworks Serverless Training infrastructure they used to develop it is also unique and needed. Except if someone works at one of a handful of the largest labs, it is very difficult to set up or try any sort of training pipeline. The managed training infrastructure makes it available to more people.
nostrebored•about 2 hours ago
I can’t help but think it’s more expensive tinker.
esafak•about 3 hours ago
It looks like it would be similar to GLM 5.3 Flash, had they tested it...