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Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

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Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#211

Post by bnolsen »

dpedu wrote: post #92
properbrew wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was never really into Apple hardware (mainly the price), however I recently got an M1 Mac Mini and an iPhone for app development, and the inference speed for as you say, a 5 year old chip is actually crazy. If they made the M series fully open for Linux (I know Asahi is working away) I probably would never buy another non-M series processor again.

I got an M1 Mac Mini somewhat recently as well, to replace my ~2012 Mac Mini that I use as a media center PC. And frankly, it's overkill. Used ones can be had for $200-$300 USD, lower side with cosmetic damage. An absolute steal, IMO.

Work gave me an m1 pro with 32gb on it. A year ago I put together one of those minisforum board+laptop apu with 64gb ram and 2tb nvme for not much money at the time, likely 500usd. For the performance sensitive software I was working on the 7935hs ran with about 50x more throughout using compilers with llvm backend.

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#213

Post by robotresearcher »

adrianN wrote: post #202
zmmmmm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you calculate depreciation and running costs on a new car in most places - I think it probably would be.

If Uber were cheaper than the depreciation and running costs of a car, what would be left for the driver (and Uber)?

My private car provides less than one commute per day, on average.

An Uber car can provide several.

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#214

Post by robotresearcher »

MisterTea wrote: post #93
eleventyseven wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lazy easy cheap shot. But do you deny these aspects from the article are not coming? Or won't be still here in 5 years? - Addition of more—and faster—memory. - Consolidation of memory. - Combination of chips on the same silicon. All of these are also happening for non AI reasons. The move to SoC that really started with the M1 wasn't because of AI, but unified memory being the default is something we will see in 5…

> The move to SoC that really started with the M1 No it did not. There were numerous SoC that came before it and was inevitable in this space.

Which widely available laptops with comparable but prior to M1 SOCs are you thinking of?

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#215

Post by fnord77 »

gcanyon wrote: post #201
jwr wrote: post #96

The author seems unaware of how well recent Apple laptops run LLMs. This is puzzling and puts into question the validity of anything in this article.

If Apple offered a reasonably-priced laptop with more than 24gb of memory (I'm writing this on a maxed-out Air) I'd agree. I've been buying Apple laptops for a long time, and buying the maximum memory every time. I just checked, and I see that now you can get 32gb. But to get 64gb I think you have to spend $3700 for the MBMax, and 128gb starts at $4500, almost 3x the 32gb Air's price. And as far as I understand it, a…

it's astonishing how apple gouges on the memory and ssd upgrade prices (I'm on an M1 w/ 64Gb/4Tb).

That said they have some elasticity when it comes to the DRAM shortage.

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#216

Post by [deleted] »

znpy wrote: post #50
noosphr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feast and famine. In three years we will be swimming in more ram than we know what to do with.

That might not be the case. The kind of memory that will flood the second-hand market could not be the kind of memory we can stuff in laptops or even desktop systems.

[deleted]

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#217

Post by __turbobrew__ »

adrianN wrote: post #202
zmmmmm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you calculate depreciation and running costs on a new car in most places - I think it probably would be.

If Uber were cheaper than the depreciation and running costs of a car, what would be left for the driver (and Uber)?

While your car in sitting in the parking lot, the uber driver is utilizing their car throughout the day.

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#218

Post by nl »

AyyEye wrote: post #197
nl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% yes. The amount of compute in the world is doubling over 2 years because of the ongoing investment in AI (!!) In some scenario where new investment stops flowing and some AI companies go bankrupt all that compute will be looking for a market. Inference providers are already profitable so with cheaper hardware it will mean even cheaper AI systems.

You should probably disclose that you're a CTO at an AI startup, I had to click your bio to see that. > The amount of compute in the world is doubling over 2 years because of the ongoing investment in AI (!!) All going into the hands of a small group of people that will soon need to pay the piper. That said, VC backed tech companies almost universally pull the rug once the money stops coming in. And historically thos…

I'm not longer CTO at an AI startup. Updated, but don't actually see how that is relevant.

> All going into the hands of a small group of people that will soon need to pay the piper.

It's not very small! On the inference side there are many competitive providers as well as the option of hiring GPU servers yourself.

> And historically those didn't have the trillions of dollars in future obligations that the current compute hardware oligopoly has. I can't see any universe where they don't start charging more, especially now that they've begun to make computers unaffordable for normal people.

I can't say how strongly I disagree with this - it's just not how competition works, or how the current market is structured.

Take gpt-oss-120B as an example. It's not frontier level quality but it's not far off and certainly gives a strong redline that open source models will never get less intelligent than.

There is a competitive market in hosting providers, and you can see the pricing here: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-oss-120b/providers?...

In what world is there a way in which all the providers (who are want revenue!) raise prices above the premium price Cerebas is charging for their very high speed inference?

There's already Google, profitable serving at the low-end at around half the price of Cerebas (but then you have to deal with Google billing!)

The fact that Azure/Amazon are all pricing exactly the same as 8(!) other providers as well as the same price https://www.voltagepark.com/blog/how-to-deploy-gpt-oss-on-a-... gives for running your own server shows how the economics work on NVidia hardware. There's no subsidy going on there.

This is on hardware that is already deployed. That isn't suddenly going to get more expensive unless demand increases... in which case the new hardware coming online over the next 24 months is a good investment, not a bad one!

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#219

Post by nl »

oa335 wrote: post #194
nl wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% yes. The amount of compute in the world is doubling over 2 years because of the ongoing investment in AI (!!) In some scenario where new investment stops flowing and some AI companies go bankrupt all that compute will be looking for a market. Inference providers are already profitable so with cheaper hardware it will mean even cheaper AI systems.

> Inference providers are already profitable. That surprises me, do you remember where you learned that?

Lots of sources, and you can do the math yourself.

Here's a few good ones:

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20... (suggests Deepseek is making 80% raw margin on inference)

https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...

https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... (there's a HN discussion of this where it was pointed out this overestimates the costs)

https://www.tensoreconomics.com/p/llm-inference-economics-fr... (long, but the TL;DR is that serving Lllama 3.3 70B costs around $0.28/million tokens input, $0.95 output at high utilization. These are close to what we see in the market: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/llama-3-3-instruct-70b/... )

Re: Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades

#220

Post by suprjami »

Extremely cringe article.

The biggest thing to affect laptops in "decades" is solid state storage. No longer do you need to worry about killing your entire device simply by putting it down on a solid surface.

There are also plenty of other things like modern dense lithium ion batteries with 12+ hour runtimes, super power friendly CPUs of all architectures, the ultra-thin body and metal body popularised by Apple, LCD panels without ghosting, external power bricks instead of literally a PC power supply in a briefcase.

But yeah sure, the infinite slop plagiarism machine is coming. Gotta get some clicks!

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