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The 70B Model May Belong Upstream

TL;DR for operators If a team has a small labelled seed set and a large volume of multilingual text to classify, keeping the strongest LLM in every inference request may not be the best allocation of compute. Pecher et al. find that smaller models using examples generated by LLaMA-3 70B can exceed that same 70B model used directly as a zero-shot classifier with roughly 50 synthetic examples in aggregated language groups.1 ...

September 2, 2026 · 8 min · Zelina
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Prompt Without Words: Distilling GPT Semantics for Smarter Vision Models

TL;DR for operators Most attempts to improve CLIP-style image classification with large language models follow a familiar ritual: ask GPT to describe a class, paste those descriptions into prompts, then hope the model pays attention to the useful bits. The problem is that GPT’s descriptions are not stable objects. They vary by query wording, include hedged statements, and sometimes contain features that are hard or impossible to verify visually. “Usually,” “may,” and “often” are not exactly the foundations of a disciplined recognition system. ...

July 13, 2025 · 14 min · Zelina