DeepSeek. Secrets of Smart LLMs: How Small Models Beat Giants

Imagine this: a 27B language model outperforming giants with 340B and even 671B parameters. Sounds impossible? But that’s exactly what happened thanks to breakthrough research in generative reward modeling. In this episode, we unpack one of the most exciting advances in recent years — Self-Principled Critique Tuning (SPCT) and the new DeepSeek GRM architecture that’s changing how we think about training and using LLMs.

We start with the core challenge: how do you get models not just to output text, but to truly understand what’s useful for humans? Why is generating honest, high-quality reward signals the bottleneck for all of Reinforcement Learning? You’ll learn why traditional approaches — scalar and pairwise reward models — fail in the messy real world, and what makes SPCT different.

Here’s the twist: DeepSeek GRM doesn’t rely on fixed rules. It generates evaluation principles on the fly, writes detailed critiques, and… learns to be flexible. But the real magic comes next: instead of just making the model bigger, researchers introduced inference-time scaling. The model generates multiple sets of critiques, votes for the best, and then a “Meta RM” filters out the noise, keeping only the most reliable judgments.

The result? A system that’s not only more accurate and fair but can outperform much larger models. And the best part — it does so efficiently. This isn’t just about numbers on a benchmark chart. It’s a glimpse of a future where powerful AI isn’t locked away in corporate data centers but becomes accessible to researchers, startups, and maybe even all of us.

In this episode, we answer:

• How does SPCT work and why are “principles” the key to smart self-critique?

• What is inference-time scaling, and how does it turn medium-sized models into champions?

• Can a smaller but “smarter” AI really rival the giants with hundreds of billions of parameters?

• Most importantly: what does this mean for the future of AI, democratization of technology, and ethical model use?

We leave you with this thought: if AI can not only think but also judge itself using principles, maybe we’re standing at the edge of a new era of self-learning and fairer systems.

👉 Follow the show so you don’t miss new episodes, and share your thoughts in the comments: do you believe “smart scaling” will beat the race for sheer size?

Key Takeaways:

• SPCT teaches models to generate their own evaluation principles and adaptive critiques.

• Inference-time scaling makes smaller models competitive with massive ones.

• Meta RM filters weak judgments, boosting the quality of final reward signals.

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Read more: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02495