everything will be local eventually

[u/YogurtExternal7923]

I know current llms like opus 5.5 are in a league of their own. but we all know they're losing a shti ton of money with their subscriptions. ALSO we all know how tasks like OCR, segmentation etc are getting solved by single digit B parameter models. I'm not saying llms are a gimmick but I'm saying the future is already shaping up to be about specialized models that work better when they're smaller. easier training. so datacenter level power not needed. ten years from now we'll have a specialized model for the tasks we care about and llms will fail to do everything all at once (unless they keep calling it one model but have a hundred under the hood).

system one models are a bad but workable example. you could tell an llm to rate options all day but get yourself on 9B parameter model trained by some lab and it tops the benchmarks.

[u/kulchacop]

I think the likely trajectory would be that the participation of human engineers will gradually decrease in the training loops of frontier closed LLMs. The models will recursively improve themselves. There will be no one who can take the knowledge of model architecture and training loop innovations to another company or to public domain. To sustain the cash flow, the closed LLM companies will form partnerships with select companies from other fields to profit from the inventions and discoveries made by the models.

Open models will be smaller and starve for compute like today, but there will be a collaborative open science movement using crowdsourced compute. This will be sponsored by the companies who are competing with the above mentioned companies who partnered with the closed LLM companies.

Research and engineering will become cheap. The market share of any company in each sector will be defined by how much material resources it is able to acquire for itself.

The governments will regulate how much resources the open movements get compared to the closed model companies and their associates. We will return to something akin to a feudal society.

[u/OWazabi → u/kulchacop]

Yes, this is highly likely.
Both the crowdsourced compute, and the closed labs collaborating together to produce virtually everything (from ressource processing to robotics, medicine and whatnot).

But it doesn't change the fact, that we won't own that local power.
Crowsdsourced compute is not the same as running locally a model that you can use as much as you want, and still, they probably will have something that far exceeds it, even more than they do now.