alt Hacker NewsMagic math and computer science that allows us to get the same quality response for a fraction of the GPU.
Replies
The current LLMs are also "magic" so anything is possible. AFAIK there is no proof that the current architecture is optimal. And we have our brains as a pretty powerful local thinking machine as a counter-example to the idea that thinking has to happen in data centers.
I mean, the most cutting edge of iPhones, iPads and MacBook Pros _today_ are quite capable of running in realtime today’s high-end local LLMs.
If you project out that hardware just a couple of years, and the trained models out a couple of years, you end up in a place where it makes so much more sense to run them locally, for all sorts of latency, privacy, efficacy, and domain-specific reasons.
Not all that different from the old terminal & mainframe->pc shifts.
Finally - hardware has seemingly gotten out ahead of software that most folks use - watching YouTube, listening to music, playing a game or two. There was a time when playing an mp3 or watching a 4k video really taxed all but the nicest systems. Hardware fixed that problem, like it very well could this one.
That's already happening. Qwen3.6 and Gemma4.
Basically small and medium models that are crazy well trained for their sizes.
Then we have a lot of specular decoding stuff like MTP and others coming to speed up responses, and finally better quantisation to use less memory.
Local LLM is the future, and the larger labs know that the open models will eat their lunch once people realise that the gap is only a few months. If we were good with LLMs a couple months ago, we're good with the open models now.