AGI In Your Pocket: The Future of Lean, Mean, Portable Open-Source (Ph.D. Level) LLMs
AGI In Your Pocket: The Future of Lean, Mean, Portable Open-Source (Ph.D. Level) LLMs NEWSFLASH January 29, 2025 – A breakthrough at UC Berkeley’s AI lab signals a seismic shift in artificial intelligence. PhD candidate Jiayi Pan and team recreated DeepSeek R1-Zero’s core capabilities for just $30 using a 3B-parameter model, proving sophisticated AI no longer requires billion-dollar budgets (Pan et al., 2025). This watershed moment exemplifies how small language models (SLMs) are reshaping our path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). From Lab Curiosity to Pocket-Sized Powerhouse The Berkeley team’s TinyZero project achieved what many thought impossible: replicating DeepSeek’s self-verification and multi-step reasoning in a model smaller than GPT-3. Their secret weapon? Reinforcement learning applied to arithmetic puzzles. Key Breakthrough: The 3B model developed human-like problem-solving strategies: - Revised answers through iterative self-checking - Broke dow...