Is there a solution for this? I'm currently just making users download onnx models if they want a feature, but it's not smooth UX
Local AI needs to be the norm
231–240 of 804 posts
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a very dangerous gamble. Today incredible value is available for nearly everyone. But it may stop without any warning, for reason outside our control. What stops you from running the best open weighted LLMs currently available on consumer grade hardware for the rest of time? They're good enough for 95% of use cases, and they don't have a used by date. From what I can see, the "danger" is not having the next ti…
> they don't have a used by date For quite a lot of use cases, the current systems arguably do get worse over time if not continually updated. The knowledge cutoff date will start to hurt more and more as the weights age in a hypothetical scenario where you are stuck with them forever. Coding, one of the most popular usescases today, would not be great if it say only understood java to a version from years ago etc. h…
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re really not good enough, unless you consider 64 GB of memory or more consumer grade.
I’m pretty happy with what a 32GB Mac Studio can do for a lot of tasks. They’re the things I’d throw a model like Haiku at, but still genuinely useful. We don’t have an answer to frontier models in the consumer range yet, but we’re not totally trapped. Side note though, it’s the speed that bothers me more than the reasoning. Qwen 3.5 is awesome, but my Claude subscription can tear through similar workloads an order o…
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a very dangerous gamble. Today incredible value is available for nearly everyone. But it may stop without any warning, for reason outside our control. What stops you from running the best open weighted LLMs currently available on consumer grade hardware for the rest of time? They're good enough for 95% of use cases, and they don't have a used by date. From what I can see, the "danger" is not having the next ti…
> they don't have a used by date For quite a lot of use cases, the current systems arguably do get worse over time if not continually updated. The knowledge cutoff date will start to hurt more and more as the weights age in a hypothetical scenario where you are stuck with them forever. Coding, one of the most popular usescases today, would not be great if it say only understood java to a version from years ago etc. h…
This LLM trained only and entirely on pre-1930s texts was able to code Python programs when given only a short example:
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I think deepseek, qwen, and kimi earn a lot of trust open sourcing their models. While still profiting. Effectively they are saying "yea don't crowd our data centers with small queries, go ahead and send your frontier questions to our frontier models. Oh btw those us models? You can run something about as good for free from us if you want hah." It's a power and marketing move. It's also insanely smart to…
You can still make money on open weight models. The compute required to run these models is still very far out of reach for the average consumer, yet known enthusiast, therefore they still sell inference, whilst also getting consumer goodwill for providing open weights.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I’ve begun to suspect that most people are probably running different hardware. Sure, you run the latest deep flash on your brand new M5 128G maybe you get acceptable performance? But honestly, how many people have an extra $9000 laying around these days? Right now, running with acceptable performance is kind of a luxury. I wish the people who always say - “This is great!” - would realize that not everyone has…
Actually even with a 9k hardware you won't get good enough performance. There is an interesting video from antirez on trying to run deepseek v4 flash 2bits on a m3 max 128GB ... and the result is kind delusional: as soon as the context start growing you are around 20token/s.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#237Local models are much less energy efficient right?
If you are simply measuring Watt Cost per Token, you are missing the mark drastically. You have to measure quality output per Watt.
It sounds reasonably difficult to benchmark this, maybe I'm wrong though.
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#238Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#239They will be, and that moment is not that far off. We've got the progression in place already: first, large data centers could have performant LLMs, we are now firmly in "a bunch of servers with a couple of H100s each" territory, slowly going into "128 GB VRAM on a MacBook Pro or a Strix Halo". Within the next year, the pattern of "expensive remote LLM for planning, local slow-but-faster-than-human LLM for execution"…
> They will be, and that moment is not that far off. It's here, right now. I'm running quantized Qwen and Gemma on a decent, but three years old gaming rig (think RTX 3080 12GB and 32 GB RAM). Yes, it's slow, it has a small context window. But it can (given a proper harness) run through my trip photos and categorize them. It can OCR receipts and summarize spendings. It can answer simple questions, analyze code and ev…
Re: Local AI needs to be the norm
#240I wonder if a popularization moment for local AI will ultimately be the pin-prick that pops the AI bubble. Like the deepseek or openclaw moments but bigger/next.
That's like wondering if enough people discovering local media streaming will disrupt commercial streaming services. It's not going to happen. Most people are not ambitious and will let themselves be controlled by the services of least resistance. And you can't take comfort in knowing that you, personally, will remain in control of your own computing. The majority will let the range and direction of their thoughts an…
Streaming Services are getting worse and more expensive. I don't see a single report suggesting piracy is decreasing, it seemingly is only increasing now.
When costs increase, quality decreases people look for alternatives. The advent of faster broadband enabled Napster and MP3 sharing. I think this could have a resurgence if the peices align correctly (a new bitorrent client, a new torrent site, something to break the status quo).
How this related to AI, I don't know, although I wouldn't be set on the idea that we will never have local AI as the norm. There is a lot more movement in this space then there is for local streaming imo.