[HN Gopher] Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model
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       Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model
        
       Author : linolevan
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2026-01-28 00:57 UTC (22 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.arcee.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.arcee.ai)
        
       | linolevan wrote:
       | I'm particularly excited to see a "true base" model to do
       | research off of (https://huggingface.co/arcee-ai/Trinity-Large-
       | TrueBase).
        
       | mynti wrote:
       | They trained it in 33 days for ~20m (that includes apparently not
       | only the infrastructure but also the salaries over a 6 month
       | period). And the model is coming close to QWEN and Deepseek.
       | Pretty impressive
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | The price/scaling of training another same class model always
         | seems to be dropping through the floor but training models
         | which score much better seems to be hitting a brick wall.
         | 
         | E.g. gemini-3-pro tops the lmarena text chart today at 1488 vs
         | 1346 for gpt-4o-2024-05-13. That's a win rate of 70% (where 50%
         | is equal chance of winning) over 1.5 years. Meanwhile, even the
         | open weights stuff OpenAI gave away last summer scores between
         | the two.
         | 
         | The exception seems to be net new benchmarks/benchmark
         | versions. These start out low and then either quickly get
         | saturated or hit a similar wall after a while.
        
       | observationist wrote:
       | This is a wonderful release.
        
       | frogperson wrote:
       | What exactly does "open" mean in this case? Is it weights and
       | data or just weights?
        
         | someotherperson wrote:
         | It's always open weights.
        
           | jetpackjoe wrote:
           | It's never open data
        
             | jacquesm wrote:
             | Well, it is, it's your data to begin with after all but
             | admitting that would create some problems.
        
       | mwcampbell wrote:
       | Given that it's a 400B-parameter model, but it's a sparse MoE
       | model with 13B active parameters per token, would it run well on
       | an NVIDIA DGX Spark with 128 GB of unified RAM, or do you
       | practically need to hold the full model in RAM even with sparse
       | MoE?
        
         | timschmidt wrote:
         | Even with MoE, holding the model in RAM while individual
         | experts are evaluated in VRAM is a bit of a compromise. Experts
         | can be swapped in and out of VRAM for each token. So RAM <->
         | VRAM bandwidth becomes important. With a model larger than RAM,
         | that bandwidth bottleneck gets pushed to the SSD interface. At
         | least it's read-only, and not read-write, but even the fastest
         | of SSDs will be significantly slower than RAM.
         | 
         | That said, there are folks out there doing it.
         | https://github.com/lyogavin/airllm is one example.
        
         | antirez wrote:
         | Can run with mmap() but it is slower. 4-bit quantized there is
         | a decent ratio between the model size and the RAM, with a fast
         | SSD one could try to see how it works. However when a model is
         | 4-bit quantized there is often the doubt that it is not better
         | than an 8-bit quantized model of 200B parameters, it depends on
         | the model, on the use case, ... Unfortunately the street for
         | local inference of SOTA model is being stopped by the RAM
         | prices and the GPU request of the companies, leaving us with
         | little. Probably today the best bet is to buy Mac Studio
         | systems and then run distributed inference (MLX supports this
         | for instance), or a 512 GB Mac Studio M4 that costs, like 13k$.
        
       | greggh wrote:
       | The only thing I question is the use of Maverick in their
       | comparison charts. That's like comparing a pile of rocks to an
       | LLM.
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-28 23:00 UTC)