A Shift in LLM Marketing : The Rise of the B2B Model
Snowflake announced Artic, their open 17b model. The LLM perfomance chart is replete with new offerings in just a few weeks. Overall knowledge performance is asymptoting as expected. It’s hard to discern the most recent dots.
Snowflake focuses on the model’s enterprise performance : SQL generation, code completion, & logic. This push will be echoed by others as models start to specialize.
When Databricks/Mosaic launched DBRX, their announcement focused on openness, training efficiency, & inference efficiency.
With the MMLU general knowledge (high school equivalency) score now asymptoting, buyers of models will begin to care about different attributes. For a data-focused customer base, SQL generation, code completion for Python, & following instructions matter more than encyclopedic knowledge of Napoleon’s doomed march to Moscow.
The push to smaller models is another form of differentiation. Smaller models are much less expensive to operate : two orders of magnitude or more.
