alt Hacker NewsWhilst these coding models improve, they seem to cater for multiple languages, and for many, a trimmed-down LLM that supports just one language would be fantastic. This would be smaller, more able to run on the hardware people have at home, realistically (even on the CPU). Having one LLM that knows assembler, java, bain, C etc is neat, but when you only work and use one language at a time, it would be kinda neat to have those broken out into dedicated, smaller LLMs. After all Qwen3.8-Max handles over 90 programming languages - ask any programmer to name a list of computer languages and if they get over 20, they are doing well.
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That's not how LLMs work. If you're talking about number of parameters, you wouldn't be able to reduce the size much by "removing" support for other languages.
I think you'd want to remove e.g. knowledge of harry potter universe and ancient egypt. Training on a bunch of high quality java code bases is still likely to improve your python model.
Teaching model to code in say python does indeed increase its effectiveness in other seemingly unrelated areas. On the other hand I remember that early models of ChatGPT were great in chess notation and later models aren’t as good as OpenAI doesn’t prioritize this now
I believe the knowledge of multiple languages brings something onto the table that having narrow language knowledge does not. The LLM will be able to better generalize a problem, apply universal concepts and avoid mistakes that would otherwise be too "echo chambery". Even as a human, knowing multiple languages has made me better at my primary language.