Nerd sniping the hackernews/twitter crowd with "large scale transformer-based language model alternatives."

People don't want to believe something as unsatisfying as "Scaling up LLMs" can yield something as profound as AGI/be useful, and just hope that literally anything else can take their mindshare away, and this just happens to be the new rage. Along with clearly-not-frontier-level open source models, non-transformer based architectures, etc.

Beats me also - this feels unreliable, extremely niche, and over-hyped. I don't trust LLMs even when they explain their reasoning; the idea of trusting a black-box classifier like this seems insane.

For certain tasks, it seems much, much more efficient. That's not nothing. People have been using LLMs for various classification tasks.