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What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

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Re: What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

#51

> applying this compression algorithm at scale may significantly relax the memory bottleneck issue. I don’t think they’re going to downsize though, I think the big players are just going to use the freed up memory for more workflows or larger models because the big players want to scale up. It’s a cat and mouse race for the best models.

It will also help with local inference, making AI without big players possible.

Re: What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

#53
"The TurboQuant paper (ICLR 2026) contains serious issues in how it describes RaBitQ, including incorrect technical claims and misleading theory/experiment comparisons.

We flagged these issues to the authors before submission. They acknowledged them, but chose not to fix them. The paper was later accepted and widely promoted by Google, reaching tens of millions of views.

We’re speaking up now because once a misleading narrative spreads, it becomes much harder to correct. We’ve written a public comment on openreview (https://openreview.net/forum?id=tO3AS KZlok ).

We would greatly appreciate your attention and help in sharing it."

https://x.com/gaoj0017/status/2037532673812443214

Re: What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hyperscalers do not want us running models at the edge and they will spend infinite amounts of circular fake money to ensure hardware remains prohibitively expensive forever.

> and they will spend infinite amounts of circular fake money to ensure hardware remains prohibitively expensive forever. That's ridiculous, "infinite money" isn't a thing. They will spend as much as they can not because they want to keep local solutions out, but because it enables them to provide cheaper services and capture more of the market. We all eventually benefit from that.

[deleted]

Re: What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

#57
post #53

"The TurboQuant paper (ICLR 2026) contains serious issues in how it describes RaBitQ, including incorrect technical claims and misleading theory/experiment comparisons. We flagged these issues to the authors before submission. They acknowledged them, but chose not to fix them. The paper was later accepted and widely promoted by Google, reaching tens of millions of views. We’re speaking up now because once a misleadin…

Openreview link is not working, was split apparently.

https://openreview.net/forum?id=tO3ASKZlok

Re: What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

#58
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If models become more efficient we will move more of the work to local devices instead of using SaaS models. We’re still in the mainframe era of LLM.

As I understand this advancement, this doesn't let you run bigger models, it lets you maintain more chat context. So Anthropic and OpenAI won't need as much hardware running inference to serve their users, but it doesn't do much to make bigger models work on smaller hardware. Though I'm not an expert, maybe my understanding of the memory allocation is wrong.

Seems to me if the model and the kv cache are competing for the same pool of memory, then massively compressing the cache necessarily means more ram available for (if it fits) a larger model, no?

Re: What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

#59
I mean, since GPT-4, I believe the RAM is no longer creating the miracle that the LLM performance scales directly with the model size. At least ChatGPT itself convinced me that any decent-sized company can create a GPT4 equivalent in terms of model size, but limited by service options, like memory cache and hallucination handling. Companies buy RAM simply to ride the stock hype.

I am no expert, so this is a shallow take, but I think the global LLM already reaches its limit, and general AGI could only be possible if it's living in the moment, i.e., retraining every minute or so, and associating it with a much smaller device that can observe the surroundings, like a robot or such.

Instead of KV cache, I have an idea of using LoRA's instead: having a central LLM unchanged by learning, surrounded by a dozen or thousands of LoRAs, made orthogonal to each other, each competed by weights to be trained every 1 min say. The LLM, since it's a RNN anyway, provides "summarize what your state and goal is at this moment" and trains the LoRAs with the summary along with all the observations and say inputs from the users. The output of the LoRAs feeds back to the LLM for it to decide the weights for further LoRAs training.

Anyways, I am just thinking there needs to be a structure change of some kind.

Re: What if AI doesn't need more RAM but better math?

#60

We will not see memory demand decrease because this will simply allow AI companies to run more instances. They still want an infinite amount of memory at the moment, no matter how AI improves.

I'm not sure that's infinitely true as long as AI costs to the user are proportional to the cost it takes to run the model. Even if user costs are heavily subsidized by investment, as long as they are non-zero and go up when models cost more, there will be at least some pressure for cheaper models and not just more capable ones and that pressure will go up with costs. AI is a crazy industry, but it's not totally immune to the law of supply and demand.

The real question though is how close are we to the point where the pressure is more for efficiency rather than capability. Anecdotally I think it's a ways off. Right now the general vibe I get is that people feel AI is very impressive for how cheap it is to use, which suggests to me that a lot of users would be very willing to pay more for more capable models. So the tipping point where AI hardware demand might slow down seems a ways off.

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