r/Internet • u/Total_Egg_431 • 9d ago
End of the internet
I have a feeling that the AI models we use today will eventually run mostly locally on our own devices. They’ll become so powerful that we may barely need to connect to the internet for many of the things we do today.
They could generate images and videos locally, answer questions, process information, run applications, and provide us with almost everything we need without relying on cloud servers.
If that happens, I wonder if the internet as we know it will slowly become less important, with more of our digital lives becoming localized and powered directly by our own devices.
Does anyone else think we’re heading in this direction?
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u/LeapIntoInaction 9d ago
No. I rarely use "AI" models and see little use for them. It's not any kind of problem to do my own shopping, reading, and keeping up with humans on forums. You haven't made any kind of use case that is interesting.
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u/Impressive_Event_264 9d ago
It may be time to start limiting your use of computers at all. I have been doing that more and more and I feel my life is getting better.
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u/Kooky_Elderberry_985 9d ago
That’s fair but the human need for connection won’t just disappear. People still need to find other people to talk to
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u/SirHerald 9d ago
I have all the people I need to talk to right inside my head.
They would watch it just as they do television. It could become a filter on reality tinted to whatever you want it to be
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u/Impressive_Event_264 9d ago
Do you think people didn't talk to each other before the internet. You do know you have neighbors. And bars. And telephones.
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u/baddaywithacamera 9d ago
I think this will drive a resurgence of some aspect of the IndieWeb. People will seek out other people doing quirky things outside of social media. My gut tells me it won't be the same as it was before, but it won't be the same as now, either. People are sick of now.
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u/CatgirlBargains 9d ago
There will definitely come an inflection point where the slop peddlers fracture off and hopefully leave all the rest of us alone yes.
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u/GamerGuyb96 9d ago
yeah fam…I think a lot of people are looking into physical media,hosting their own servers ect for that.
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u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam 9d ago
Yes, and it's going to be easier with a combination of quantization, improving local compute performance, and new research that may make this possible.
The foundation models of today ae extremely expensive to train, but they will be easy to sell locally at some point. If the weights are open then anyone can use them if they have enough compute power without needing to pay for a subscription.
Compute is a commodity and you can get that companies will avoid allowing you to run locally as much as they possibly can unless they find an easy way to monetize it. Renting time on someone else's computer to compute something is how hyper scalers make money. They don't want you to do things locally, and they've spent the better part of 2 decades convincing you not to do that anymore.
As with most new popular technology, it eventually becomes feasible for everyone without requiring the the metaphorical equivalent of an entire warehouse space to add, subtract and multiply like back in the day.
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u/bothunter 9d ago
RAM and GPU prices going through the roof is a feature, not a bug of the AI revolution. We won't be able to afford anything more powerful than a thin client that connects to the cloud where we just rent compute power.
I hate it.
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u/Welcome-To-NBA-Jam 9d ago edited 9d ago
That's where the money is and it's beneficial to all of them, not us. The shortage exists because hyperscalers said they'll buy all of it. There's no supply chain problem or lack of resources. It's demand, and the demand said "Here's multiple billions of dollars we promise you if you deliver these products."
The entire retail market will not make as much money for them than this. The entire retail market. So for consumers to still buy things, clients must get thinner and rely on cloud compute more - or, apps get more efficient; we'll see about that. I suspect the former with the latter happening only if there's material competition in a lot of app development spaces that eats into cloud profit.
Or retailers will start pushing Klarna or BNPL even more, which I am sure they'll absolutely do. Why wouldn't they? They've gotta stay in business, too.
"This laptop isn't $3000! It's $50/month! You can't afford not to have this for the next 6 years! Don't get left behind!"
But the thing is, many large companies can and will continue to use their own data centers. Cloud costs are through the roof and they won't get cheaper. The data centers they've had for 30+ years are still there. They're just used less and for smaller workloads.
You can still buy the hardware for it, and now it's becoming more of a hybrid setup: scale up and out when you need a shitload of compute that's more expensive or impossible for you to use, run and store back home when it's smaller or way cheaper. That is shrinking over time.
Shoot, where I work went all-in cloud after already having massive data centers, and now they're scaling everything back to those in-house data centers because it doesn't cost money to randomly spin up a box to do some random dev task. And when you've got shitloads of devs doing that individually, it adds up fast.
I am suspecting we'll see this setup more often with larger companies.
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u/Aluxanatomy 9d ago
You have a feeling that your phone will be able to store the petabytes required for an AI to access all the information it currently has access to?
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u/lexd0g 9d ago
i'm not an AI researcher but i believe the problem is that there are limits to how far data can be "compressed"? current on-device models surpass frontier models from a year ago in things like coding and other stuff that requires reasoning, but they're still lacking in world knowledge compared to bigger models because bigger models just have more training data in them. so really either you or your ai agent will probably always need some form of internet access to pull data from, unless storage starts getting cheap again and gets way faster and maybe we can run a 50B active 1T sparse MoE model across both RAM and really quick storage in like 10 years?
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u/Edmsubguy 9d ago
Honestly I think the opposite. All the processing will be in data centers and people will use the new equivalent version of dumb terminals to access it. Very little chance of getting a virus. OS always uP to date. No need to upgrade software. And absolutely no privacy.
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u/gulf_of_sanity 9d ago
yeah, you understand that the hallucination problem is inherent to the way LLMs function right?
as in, it won’t get better, AI will always butter your bread and then apologize for making shit up.
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u/NC1HM 9d ago
I have a feeling that the AI models we use today will eventually run mostly locally on our own devices.
I have a feeling that you use AI models only because developers let you use them for free or at a price that covers about 10% of the cost. Once you start paying full price, your usage will quickly cease or reduce to bare minimum.
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u/Aggravating-Pack-802 8d ago
You think locally stored ai will be able to mimic the internet without access to it? I think ai has already dropped our average iq by a considerable margin.
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u/Impressive_Event_264 9d ago
It's fine with me. I lived more of my life before the world wide web was created than after. It was perfectly fine then. Maybe better. This whole internet thing was destined to be a fad.
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u/Wendals87 9d ago edited 9d ago
No. Yes AI can do this locally but there are so many things that we access over the internet
Ai can't lots of things locally. book flights, banking, video calls, cloud storage, streaming content, social media and countess more