What does HackerNews think of Awesome-LLM?

Kind of. There's https://github.com/Hannibal046/Awesome-LLM and you can follow the subreddit too. They're not amazing though, so I'm in the process of making my own catalogue.

Here are some high level answers:

"7B" refers to the number of parameters or weights for a model. For a specific model, the versions with more parameters take more compute power to train and perform better.

A foundational model is the part of a ML model that is "pretrained" on a massive data set (and usually is the bulk of the compute cost). This is usually considered the "raw" model after which it is fine-tuned for specific tasks (turned into a chatbot).

"8K length" refers to the Context Window length (in tokens). This is basically an LLM's short term memory - you can think of it as its attention span and what it can generate reasonable output for.

"1.5T tokens" refers to the size of the corpus of the training set.

In general Wikipedia (or I suppose ChatGPT 4/Bing Chat with Web Browsing) is a decent enough place to start reading/asking basic questions. I'd recommend starting here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model and finding the related concepts.

For those going deeper, there are lot of general resources lists like https://github.com/Hannibal046/Awesome-LLM or https://github.com/Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide or one I like, https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2023/llm-reading-list.html (there are a bajillion of these and you'll find more once you get a grasp on the terms you want to surf for). Almost everything is published on arXiv, and most is fairly readable even as a layman.

For non-ML programmers looking to get up to speed, I feel like Karpathy's Zero to Hero/nanoGPT or Jay Mody's picoGPT https://jaykmody.com/blog/gpt-from-scratch/ are alternative/maybe a better way to understand the basic concepts on a practical level.