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Comment by askiiart | Hacker News Reader

I'm on the mid-tier plan available to me. 500 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up. It would take me, bare minimum, about 6.67 minutes to upload 1 gigabyte. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about AI/ML, so I could be wrong, but assuming a fine-tuned model is the same size as the base model, it would take me 90 minutes to upload the llama2 7B model (13.5 GB).

If it were standard practice for many people, we might finally get symmetric cable. But most people aren't YouTubers. In my experience, people who aren't into tech usually have no idea their upload speeds are any slower than their download speeds, much less 25 times slower. They usually just let their phone upload their photos in the background, and it just works. Hell, I can't even find my upload speed on the consumer section of my ISP's site, only in a pdf for their business plans. Not even in legalese.

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Spectrum? Lots of cable internet right now has upstream limitations, but fiber is making it to more homes and upstream limitations are (slowly) improving on cable.

As a society we have something like a 20% CAGR on upstream speeds over the past few years. It may get better even faster, because DOCSIS 4 is coming soon and is full duplex over the same channels.

But even at 20mbps, uploading a 70B model might take you 12 hours... after you spent many hours fine-tuning it. It's annoying but not an unmanageable problem.

In my country there’s a tendency to provide max 50MBit/s up on consumer connections, but a few do offer more. I‘m on a FTTH plan with 130 up now, and think this would suffice for most current use cases. There’s also the possibility to bundle multiple connections with enterprise grade hardware - last time I looked that was a 1k one time investment. I‘m dubious as to whether that would actually boost uploading speeds though.

Same here, I'm on 600 Mbps up/down and I enjoy the up more than the down.

Which country? In Spain most of the broadband nowadays is fiber to the home and symmetric, I have one gigabit up/down. Pretty cheap too.

Yea, it takes a long time. I regularly upload 60 GB files on a 20 Mbps up residential connection. It usually takes 3-4 hours (maybe more, I usually start the upload when I'm done working for the day).

It's not that big of a deal as long as you don't sit there and stare at the progress bar the entire time.

> But most people aren't YouTubers. In my experience, people who aren't into tech usually have no idea their upload speeds are any slower than their download speeds, much less 25 times slower.

People who aren’t into tech aren’t trying to fine tune Llama2 and then upload it to a cloud machine

Be a lot cooler if they did.

It uses LoRA which is much smaller than full model

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