alt Hacker NewsIt's cool but do I really want a single browser tab downloading 2.5 GB of data and then just leaving it to be ephemerally deleted? I know the internet is fast now and disk space is cheap but I have trouble bringing myself around to this way of doing things. It feels so inefficient. I do like the idea of client-side compute, but I feel like a model (or anything) this big belongs on the server.
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I don't think local as it stands with browsers will take off simply from the lead time (of downloading the model), but a new web API for LLMs could change that. Some standard API to communicate with the user's preferred model, abstracting over local inference (like what Chrome does with Gemini Nano (?)) and remote inference (LM Studio or calling out to a provider). This way, every site that wants a language model just has to ask the browser for it, and they'd share weights on-disk across sites.
There will always be someone unhappy for literally any aspect of something new. Finding 2.5gb for a local LLM problematic in 2026, I really cannot think what is safe anymore.
We went from impossible to centralised to local in a couple of years and the "cost" is 2.5gb of hard drive.