It doesn't need to be two huge models. If there is an advantage to doing this, I'd expect that you would see it even in a small test case. I'm sure we'll see something by the end of the week if not earlier if there's something to it.
One of the most significant quantization papers of the last year [1] found precisely that these outliers only start occuring with LLMs at 6.7B parameters and above.
One of the most important keys to the success of deep learning in the last couple years has been the fact that emergent features exist after certain scales, so I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss things that don't help at smaller scales, nor would I be certain that all the tricks that help in small data/parameter regimes will necessarily help in larger models. Unfortunately!
Looking at that paper, they appear to be saying that 6.7B is where the problem becomes so intense that no single quantization method can keep up. From what I gather, the paper claims that such outliers start occur down to 125M param models, then at around 1.3B they begin to affect the FFN, and at around 6.7B is when the issue really starts to become apparent because "100% of layers use the same dimension for outliers."
So while you obviously wouldn't be able to conclusively prove the idea fixes the issue in larger models, if you know what you are looking for you should be able to validate that the method works in general down to very small models.
That said, consumer grade cards should be able to train an 8B model with quantization, so you might as well train the whole thing.
The reason it might need to be huge is because the long tail of extreme weights might only begin to show up then, but yes best to just start w something you can run on a laptop.
Yes but how much would this cost?
Would it be possible to build a small dataset that produces known outlier values, and test on that?