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Local AI needs to be the norm

unix.foo

131–140 of 804 posts

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#131
While I agree that would be the goal, we are too early for that. Just like how speech recognition used to require many server in a Datacenter to process and you send your data over. It is now completely on devices.

We are at least 5 years away from that. And DRAM needs a substantial breakthrough in cost reduction.

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#132

For the mainstream audience, the sentiment around local ai today is the same that they had around open source a few decades ago. For a few products, some paid solutions were so much more advanced that open source were very often completely overlooked. Why bother ? And the like. Then we had captive SaaS and other plateforms and now it's obviously wrong for most of us. The dependency we have with anthropic and openai f…

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Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#133
post #33

> Use cloud models only when they’re genuinely necessary. The problem is that it's much easier to use the SOTA models (especially if they are subsidized) instead of spending time fixing the knobs with the local one. I just realized this with coding agents, yeah, you probably shouldn't always use latest version at xhigh, but you will end doing it because you do the job in less time, with less "effort" and basically at…

I'm also just not seeing good performance from local models. Every time a thread about LLMs comes up, there are tons of people in the comments insisting that they're getting just as good results from the latest DeepSeek/qwen/whatever as with Opus, and that just hasn't been my experience at all: open-source models just fall over completely compared to Claude when asked to do anything remotely complicated. I have a sne…

> Every time a thread about LLMs comes up, there are tons of people in the comments insisting that they're getting just as good results from the latest DeepSeek/qwen/whatever as with Opus, and that just hasn't been my experience at all: open-source models just fall over completely compared to Claude when asked to do anything remotely complicated.

Different usage patterns - you want to issue a single spec then walk away and come back later (when it has consumed $10k worth of API tokens inside your $200/m subscription) to a finished product.

Many people issue a spec for a single function, a single class or similar. When you break it down like that, the advantages of SOTA models shrinks.

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#134
post #80

They 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"…

The biggest impact of local models may simply be that they prevent remote inference from becoming the only game in town

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#136

My problem with LLMs (apart from philosophical aspects and economical impact) is that it would be unlikely for any of us to be able to train something functional locally (toy-like LLMs -- sure, but something really useful -- no). Apart from that it requires immense computing power, it also requires a dataset which is for the most part is obtained illegally.

That's a fair concern, but I'd separate training from inference here

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#137

The shitty thing here is, either everyone's shipping 800 MB at least with their binary, or, you have to rely on the platform vendor anyway. I'm hoping there's enough external pressure that the OS vendors turn it more into a repository than a blessed-model-garden.

To be fair the author of the post is using the model Apple provides with the OS so it doesn't have any extra binary size

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#138
post #33

> Use cloud models only when they’re genuinely necessary. The problem is that it's much easier to use the SOTA models (especially if they are subsidized) instead of spending time fixing the knobs with the local one. I just realized this with coding agents, yeah, you probably shouldn't always use latest version at xhigh, but you will end doing it because you do the job in less time, with less "effort" and basically at…

The path of least resistance usually wins, especially when the pricing hides the real cost

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#139

For the mainstream audience, the sentiment around local ai today is the same that they had around open source a few decades ago. For a few products, some paid solutions were so much more advanced that open source were very often completely overlooked. Why bother ? And the like. Then we had captive SaaS and other plateforms and now it's obviously wrong for most of us. The dependency we have with anthropic and openai f…

I’m just waiting for the US Government to implement their own local AI. Which will eventually lead to them open sourcing it because it’s tax payer funded and being that the NSA has decades worth of internet data they can train on; open weights would be just as good as any companies…

Re: Local AI needs to be the norm

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the business model of open weight AI? This is what I do not understand as well and advertising the knowledge and more advanced model is also the only thing that comes to my mind. Since a month I am using gemma4 locally successfully on a MBP M2 for many search queries (wikipedia style questions) and it is really good, fast enough (30-40t/s) and feels nice as it keeps these queries private. But I don't unders…

Why would you want to try to support all users simple queries on your ai data center if they could run it on their own computer? It builds good will also. it also shows research prowess. For China it's different. They need to show Americans who don't trust them at all because of propaganda that they have no tricks up their sleeve. It also doesn't hurt when Chinese companies drop models for free people can run at home…

Very good point on using local ai to avoid data centers costs.

Running AI models on local hardware was exploratory at first, and if it's so easy today it's thanks to open source. It's a little bit coincidental that we have this today, and that mainstream hardware have this capability. The fact that a phone can run very small models is exploratory or some kind of marketing opportunity at best.

Why would hardware company ships cards with more AI capabilites (like more VRAM) in the foreseable future ? On what ground does the marketing for on device AI will keep generating interest ? For something as important, it's very uncertain. But above all, it should not depends on these brittle justifications.

Showing good will in distribution and research prowess today is positive communication, but it can be exactly the oppositite if/when an attack using those small models will reach a high value target.

For China the cultural difference is so huge, it's difficult to say. I would think they first and foremost need to show to evryone inside and outside of China that they match american models. Second, i would say that when americans prefer few very powerfull companies on the get go because they can leverage a lot of capital rapidly to industrialize, China will prefer leveraging a lot of smaller companies exploring a lot of things simultanously (so doing a lot of research), THEN creating legislation to let only the best (or a few) to survive effectively. In the end it's the same result (monopoly or oligopoly), but China may have a stronger core (research) and America may have stronger productive capital, that may be proved obsolete... In the long run, in either side it's a gamble, again.

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