Launch HN: General Instinct (YC P26) – Frontier models on edge devices

35 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by guanming0717

Item id: 48414869

13 Comments

debo_

40 minutes ago

As an aside, General Instinct sounds like the name I'd give a megacorp in one of my cyberpunk ttrpg campaigns.

BoorishBears

4 hours ago

I like the technique described here around distillation to recover from quantization, but I don't understand why we keep performing lossy compression on LLMs then using benchmarks that were nearly saturated before post-training to measure the effects.

You could erase the gains from literally half the compute going into some of these recent models and barely make a dent in MMLU-Pro and GPQA-D.

rdksu

3 hours ago

Have you run ablations on the actual effect/impact of on-policy distillation on contributing to the performance ? Just Curious ! As Unsloth based mixed quantisation methods on MoE models are widely used with great community rep.

gesai

2 hours ago

Sorry if this is somewhat off-topic:

Through my estimations, based on Bonsai's parameters/GB ratio, if one model were to have this ratio and Gemma4:12b's size, it would have the nice number of 54.125b parameters (that could run on 16GB of RAM). Is there any organization attempting something of this kind?

ilaksh

36 minutes ago

Yes Google. They just released their Gemma 4 12b quant.

VikRubenfeld

5 hours ago

You've likely heard about this - he'd probably like to talk to you and might potentially give you some good PR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAzT5lcezPs&t=467s

smokel

4 hours ago

For those too lazy to watch someone talk on video for ages to make a point:

The link is to a famous YouTuber called PewDiePie and he uses a local LLM to parse his email, to save time with that. They have an autoreply system and get notified about urgent matters.

ilaksh

31 minutes ago

I assume PewDiePie runs something like DeepSeek 4 Flash on that rig.

guanming0717

5 hours ago

Thanks for sharing! I'd love to chat with him. Would you be open to introducing us? :)

XenophileJKO

4 hours ago

I'm still kind of surprised that people are targeting edge deployment of MoE models. By definition they optimize for computation cost at the expense of memory efficiency. We generally need the opposite on the edge.

I'm hoping to see more work in the other direction with cyclic/looped transformers and other memory dense approaches.

rohansood15

4 hours ago

Have you benchmarked against other 3-bit dynamic quants like Unsloth? I am sorry but this framing against a full precision, newer, smaller MoE just seems misleading. Also, Gemma-4-26B-A4B is not the SOTA for edge. Even at launch, that would be the 31B.

guanming0717

4 hours ago

Yes I did, with other SOTA quant methods like HQQ, AWQ etc. You can find more info in our blog :) https://general-instinct.com/blog/frontier-moe-sub-4-bit

rohansood15

4 hours ago

I can't find it. Can you state your performance versus comparable 3-bit quantization from Unsloth/Bartowski? Edit: I appreciate that you seem to have open-sourced the quantization pipeline. This is not to question your work, but to understand where the outputs stand relative to the SoTA for quantization.