bench-labs/cagliostro-v3 just hit an Intelligence Index of 26.13 on the AxiomicLabs/Open_SLM_Leaderboard a 146M-param model trained completely from scratch on a single consumer GPU. That's 2nd place overall, and as far as I can tell, the most capable SLM trained on consumer hardware to date. Beating SmolLM-135m on 1/8th of the data is just silly levels of efficiency.
My (really ugly) thoughts on NVIDIA acquiring Hugging Face I don’t care if you love me or hate me – something about one of the most open community efforts ever to achieve the tagline “The community building the future“ getting gobbled up by a company that arguably is the biggest hardware monopoly that has ever existed strikes me as deeply unsettling. I don’t like monopolies, and that is that. The whole appeal of HF for me personally was always having a neutral location where anyone could develop, deploy, and test a model on their silicon of choice without being pushed into a single “official“ proprietary infrastructure stack.
I am not going to pretend that I would believe NVIDIA “open and independent“ is ever going to happen – hell we have all heard the same lines dozens of times from every corporation that has ever uttered them before.
When the single biggest producer of compute also is one of the primary locations where all open weights live, it becomes very hard not to imagine where all of this is going to end up soon enough if we continue to let companies dictate the narrative. It might be the hyperbole but it is an absolute truth for me – open-sourced AI cannot be a slave to the whims of a trillion dollar company. It is high time we realize that open AI cannot live and breathe only on the goodwill of corporate entities.