Thank you for this post: LLM notation and nomenclature drives me mad. I would like to cite this post and I always advise that writers and developers deserve full credit for their ideas, so, is there a better author credit for "Pam" or is the anonymity just a given?
It sounds like you want a standardized record of an LLM’s properties, similar to Wikipedia’s “info box”. I think you should start a public database or wiki with a page for each existing LLM and encourage everyone in the community to help keep it updated.
This is a fun little mental exercise. It strikes me that y'all are basically creating "Vehicle Identification Numbers" (VIN) for LLMs. Taking a page out of that playbook, I wonder if what you want is a like a master guide/key that would allow people to plug an LLM "VIN" in and then get a little readout with all the technical information on the model in question. Over time experts in the field of LLMology would be able to interpret the VIN by sight (as many car mechanics can do) but most people would just look it up by punching the VIN into a little app.
Thank you for this post: LLM notation and nomenclature drives me mad. I would like to cite this post and I always advise that writers and developers deserve full credit for their ideas, so, is there a better author credit for "Pam" or is the anonymity just a given?
The best I have so far is:
Trott, S. & Pam [username PAM@pdriv]. (2024, December 3). Towards an unambiguous notation for LLMs: Names like “o1-preview” are pretty vague—Can we do better? [Substack newsletter]. The Counterfactual. https://seantrott.substack.com/p/towards-an-unambiguous-notation-for
Cheers,
Leo
Thanks so much! It’s “Pam Rivière”. Never had one of these posts cited before so that’s cool—is this for an academic paper?
Not yet! It came up in a draft I am editing for a foreign student. Will let youknow if it goes further.
Leo
It sounds like you want a standardized record of an LLM’s properties, similar to Wikipedia’s “info box”. I think you should start a public database or wiki with a page for each existing LLM and encourage everyone in the community to help keep it updated.
This is a fun little mental exercise. It strikes me that y'all are basically creating "Vehicle Identification Numbers" (VIN) for LLMs. Taking a page out of that playbook, I wonder if what you want is a like a master guide/key that would allow people to plug an LLM "VIN" in and then get a little readout with all the technical information on the model in question. Over time experts in the field of LLMology would be able to interpret the VIN by sight (as many car mechanics can do) but most people would just look it up by punching the VIN into a little app.
Yeah that’s a great analogy!