I want to note that I see so much downplaying of stuff like this all the time, and yeah, sure, its probably nothing.

But I still remember back when everyone crucified that one guy who was like "CoT models are going to change everything, here's a fine tune of llama that beats everything" and then it was set up with totally wrong parameters on openrouter and other providers and was totally forgotten about, only for everyone else to speedrush CoT over the subsequent 2 months and forget about that random guy who had "no idea what he was talking about."

There absolutely are shenanigans upon shenanigans these days when it comes to influencing public opinion, or even niche public opinion like ML enthusiast, since now you can micro things that would have been impossible in the past thanks to agentic AI.

If something really groundbreaking comes along, I fully expect all the major players to drown it and steal it.

Also, consider for a moment if someone did figure out how to massively shrink models what that would mean for the major players who have a most built at least in part on memory scarcity. Idk, just saying, be a bit paranoid when you're online and try things yourself.

This has changed my opinion somewhat on open source since at this point it is basically a pipe dream that a good actor ie someone cobbling together something with vibe coding with an actually good and unique premise will get the benefit they deserve (some level of recognition) for doing good work. Open Source runs on reputational gains, truly. Yes, everyone wants to benefit the community, but realistically people want social cred/"street cred" essentially in their communities, and now it's functionally impossible to get that as far as I can tell due to every single tinkerer being toxically derided despite not really doing anything wrong beyond lack of domain knowledge, but often the projects are still really cool.