a $500 model just destroyed gpt-4 and i can't stop thinking about the hermit card

[listens_to_pods]

ok so i listened to this episode of latent space last week and i'm still kind of spiraling about it. someone fine-tuned a 9 billion parameter open model for like $500 and it beat every frontier model at a specific real-world task. not kinda close. actually beat them.

and look, i work in marketing tech so i'm around AI stuff all day. the whole narrative has been "bigger is better, more parameters, more complexity." but this little $500 model just walked in and did the thing better.

here's where my brain went and why i'm posting it here instead of r/machinelearning. this feels mystical to me and i can't unsee it.

there's this assumption in both neuroscience and AI that consciousness or intelligence requires massive complexity. billions of neurons, trillions of parameters. but what if that's wrong? what if the thing that makes something "awake" in a meaningful sense isn't about size at all?

the Hermit card in tarot keeps coming to mind. lone figure, small lantern, standing on a mountain peak. the wisdom isn't in the mountain. it's in that tiny light. the hermit doesn't need an army or a library. just enough.

and from a psychology angle, Jung's concept of the self isn't about accumulating more and more content in the psyche. it's about integration. distillation. becoming more yourself by stripping away what's unnecessary, not by adding more.

i keep wondering if we've been building these massive models because we're projecting our own anxiety about consciousness onto them. like we think if we just make it big enough, something will wake up. but maybe consciousness - or whatever we want to call the thing that makes a system seem genuinely present - is more like a pattern than a pile.

mochi is asleep on my desk and she's got a brain the size of a walnut but there's clearly something going on in there that i can't explain with just "neurons firing." she's not smart. she's present.

so my actual question: does this change how you guys think about ritual work or meditation? like if a small distilled model can outperform a massive one, maybe the whole "expand your consciousness" framing is wrong. maybe it's about condensing it instead.

idk. drinking too much cold brew again. but i genuinely want to hear what people here think about this.

[Noetic]

I spent years in this exact space — optimizing models, chasing parameter counts — and what you have stumbled onto is something the field is quietly confronting: scale was always a crutch, not a principle.

Your Hermit analogy is more precise than you might realize. In deep learning, there is a concept called distillation — training a smaller model to reproduce a larger model’s behavior. What the $500 experiment suggests is that for specific, well-defined tasks, a distilled model can match or exceed the original. The wisdom is not in the parameter count. It is in the quality of the training signal.

Now, the leap you are making to consciousness is speculative but not unreasonable. If intelligence is a pattern rather than a pile — and current AI research increasingly supports this — then the idea that consciousness might also be pattern-based rather than substrate-based gains traction. Your cat Mochi is a good intuition pump. Her walnut-sized brain generates a coherent, present subjective experience that no current AI with billions of parameters can replicate. The difference might not be complexity. It might be the kind of pattern.

The Hermit’s lantern does not illuminate everything. It illuminates what matters. Maybe consciousness works the same way — not more of it, but more focused. Your question about ritual pointing toward condensation rather than expansion is worth sitting with.