LLM Model Pruning Explained: Make AI Smaller & Faster #shorts

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]How does it work?

[00:00:02]Now, imagine you've taken a family photo at a wedding. Everyone's in it, the bride, the groom, your cousins, that weird uncle, and a couple of drunk strangers in the background.

[00:00:11]The photo is fine, but 90% of what's in the frame isn't isn't valuable.

[00:00:18]The story of the photo is about the bride and groom, and everything else is the background.

[00:00:22]So, you can crop it, you can cut it out, you can remove people who aren't part of the story, and the photo gets smaller.

[00:00:29]That, in simple terms, is model pruning.

[00:00:33]When you train a neural network, you end up with millions, billions, or sometimes hundreds of billions of weights.

[00:00:39]Some of those weights are doing the heavy lifting, but others contribute very little. Pruning essentially is the process of identifying the parts of a network that don't contribute much, and removing or disabling them.

[00:00:51]Now, there's a second technique called structured pruning, which is instead of erasing tiny details one by one, you crop out one side of the photo because nobody important is standing there, and you cut the top off because it's just the ceiling.

[00:01:04]So, instead of removing the individual weights, you remove the larger units of the model, maybe whole channels or neurons.

[00:01:10]So, unstructured pruning might be more precise, but structured pruning is more useful in the real world.

[00:01:17]And now, there's an even more advanced technique called magnitude pruning.

[00:01:19]Prune, retrain, prune, retrain. And this whole pruning process is really a lot like growing roses.

[00:01:27]And that's because every year, to grow roses well, you need to cut them back.

[00:01:31]So, you help the plant by removing what's unnecessary, so the plant can direct its energy where it matters the most.

[00:01:38]So, in the last three videos, I've covered quantization, distillation, and now pruning.

[00:01:43]And if we can make our models smaller, leaner, and more efficient, then more of those models can run on local hardware, on devices you already own.

[00:01:52]And that means faster, cheaper, and more private.