alt Hacker NewsHey, I’m really happy that someone is building this. I tried doing something similar a couple of months ago and came to the conclusion that the dataset was at least as important as the modeling itself. Building a good dataset is nowhere near as flashy as building a novel model architecture, but it really is critical.
For instance, you want to be able to handle any smart home commands people could issue, right? What are all of the smart home devices? What are all of the ways people might want to issue commands? Also, for things like Spotify, it’s not going to know what “The Beatles” are or “Led Zeppelin”. Artist and song names themselves are easily just as hard as all of the smart home devices combined.
The simple attention network stuff is cool, it makes sense to drop the MLP when it dominates the param count. But you’ll definitely lose some “world knowledge”. That’s probably ok though.
100%, data was honestly most of the work, Needle 3 is trained on 360B tokens of structured data and we spend way more time on the generation pipeline than on the model. On Led Zeppelin, Needle doesn't actually need to know it, arguments are copied from the request so it just lifts the name into the artist field. The knowledge went into the engram btw, 70M of the 121M params are n-gram tables, so it can tell artist vs song without an MLP. Also yes, "play their second album" won't work, that needs the world knowledge it doesn't have.