alt Hacker NewsHaving spent a good part of the day with it, glimmer reminds me of Rorschach from The Watchmen. No unessential parts of speech, action oriented, brief and to the point. From a token perspective anyway it’s great, and it seems to hold its own well against more verbose models.
I really do feel like it’s effective tok / s is way higher because it doesn’t waste them.
I am very struck by the way open weights LLMs seem to reflect a culture.
I don't really enjoy the way Qwen writes prose, and I find its thinking a bit exhausting, though it clearly writes very good code.
I like the neutral, clear way the Gemma models write, which I sometimes use to get myself a "getting started" document on something I want to understand; it also summarises well. It is neutral, sensible, un-showy. It writes in a way that is fairly close to what I would use for documentation. The 12B and 26B models are also very good for talking about art and photography. Analysing my own photographic work has helped me more than I expected it to.
This model, honestly, has made me smile. It also feels like it is more creative at a given temperature than Gemma. I am trying to motivate myself to do something quite open-ended so I asked it about what other people's considerations might be in my situation, and at the risk of anthropomorphising, the things it has come up with feel like the work of a more curious mind, somehow. More eclectic. I have enjoyed testing it and I really want to test it more, which might help me get over a motivation hump there, too.
(I am also exploring its hard-wired policies by asking it to analyse some studio art nude work I have done; it definitely thinks out loud about its policies in a way I have not seen Gemma do.)