48 pointsby lpellis8 days ago4 comments
  • bikeshaving2 days ago
    Does this mean we’ll finally get empirical proof for the aphorism “a picture is worth a thousand words”?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_...

    • heltale2 days ago
      I suppose it’s only worth 256 words at a time right now. ;)

      https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929

      • estebarb2 days ago
        The CALM paper https://shaochenze.github.io/blog/2025/CALM/ says it is possible to compress 4 tokens in a single embedding, so... image = 4×256=1024 words > 1000 words. QED
        • bikeshaving2 days ago
          2.4% relative error is not bad.
          • pastor_williams2 days ago
            Reminds me of Babbage making allowance for meter.

            """

                ... it is said that he [Babbage] sent the following letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson about a couplet in "The Vision of Sin":
            
                     Every minute dies a man,
                     Every minute one is born
            
                I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:
            
                     Every minute dies a man,
                     And one and a sixteenth is born
            
                I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.
            
            """

                Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines
            • cbhla day ago
              Shouldn't it be the other way around if the population is increasing? Every minute one is born = 1440 born/day, every minute and a sixteenth ~= 1335 dead/day for a net population increase of 105/day.
              • BrenBarn2 hours ago
                It means that in every minute, one and a sixteenth of a man is born.
            • zahlman2 days ago
              Wouldn't "one and a sixth" be more accurate in both respects?
        • behnamoh2 days ago
          how do you decompress all those 4 words from one token?
          • estebarb2 days ago
            Not from one token, from one embedding. Text contains a low amount of information: it is possible to compress a few token embeddings into a single tiken embedding.

            The how is variable. The calm paper seems to have used a MLP to compress from and ND input (N embeddings of size D) into a single D embedding and other for decompress them back

          • HarHarVeryFunny2 days ago
            The mechanism would be prediction (learnt during training), not decompression.

            It's the same as LLMs being able to "decode" Base64, or work with sub-word tokens for that matter, it just learns to predict that:

            <compressed representation> will be followed by (or preceded by) <decompressed representation>, or vice versa.

  • floodfx2 days ago
    Why are completion tokens more with image prompts yet the text output was about the same?
    • Garlef2 days ago
      "Thinking" Mode
    • cma2 days ago
      Some multimodal models may have a hidden captioning step that may take completion tokens, others work on a fully native representation, and some do both I think.
  • 2 days ago
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  • ashed962 days ago
    In my experience, LLMs tend to take noticeably longer to process images than text.
    • weird-eye-issue2 days ago
      It has to get the image data first, basically just IO time before processing it
      • ashed96a day ago
        IIRC there's pre-processing (embedding/tokenization?) before feeding images to LLMs?

        Hit this issue optimizing LLM request times. Ending up lowering image resolution. Lost some accuracy but could bear that.

    • psadri2 days ago
      I wonder if these stay in the prefix cache?