Urgent.News

What's breaking now, across thousands of outlets.

Tech

I gave four local models the same messy spreadsheet, and not one found the cheapest graphics card on it

Local models can sometimes perform data analysis like storytelling

I gave four local models the same messy spreadsheet, and not one found the cheapest graphics card on it

I gave four local language models the same disorganized spreadsheet full of confusing data and asked them to find the cheapest graphics card. None of the models were able to locate the correct answer. Two of the models asked questions that couldn't be reasonably inferred from the data, such as the average GPU price in Q2 2022 and the release date of the RTX 5070 Ti.

The 4B model had the most success, correctly identifying the cheapest SSD as the SK Hynix P41 in every trial. However, it struggled with the GPU average calculation, sometimes providing incorrect prices. The 3B model, while consistent in finding the correct seven cards for the average GPU question, produced inconsistent results in its answer for the GPU average, with values ranging from $466.14 to $480.43.

The 8B model performed better than the smaller models, correctly identifying the SK Hynix P41 as the cheapest 1TB SSD. However, it still failed to identify the RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 9070 XT as the cheapest GPUs, resulting in an average price of $384. The test demonstrated that while local models can process small datasets, they struggle with messy data and certain types of complex questions.

Written by urgent.news from XDA Developers's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

Read the original at xda-developers.com →

More in Tech

Designing Alerts That Explain an Incident

TL;DR An alert is a message a monitoring system sends when a measurement crosses a threshold, and its worth shows up in the decision it lets someone take in the next ten minutes.

  • Alerts measure decision-making within ten minutes
  • Ten-minute window triggers 0.02% of monthly budget
  • Alert must include symptom, scope, time window, runbook

I built an attention head out of a 1982 associative memory and measured where it breaks

The second-biggest story on Hacker News this morning (590 points) is titled "You could have invented transformers from memory" — the argument, in one line, is that attention is what you get when you…

  • Attention in neural networks can be understood as a differentiated version of associative memory.
  • Hopfield network and attention head were implemented in the same code to test the claim.
  • Associative memory degrades gradually with increasing patterns and poor input cue quality.

More from Sunday 18 October →