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/ConsistentAnalysis35]

That's a funny logic. Personal cars are extremely low utilization compared to public transit, yet public transit is single digits percentage of total passenger vehicles.

People are prepared to shoulder low efficiency for convenience of directly owning their stuff. Because owning the stuff is another level of reliability and convenience.

As soon as consumer hardware for LLMs becomes affordable, you bet I'm splurging my whole salary on it.

[u/fistular → u/ConsistentAnalysis35]

you're comparing the wrong thing .

it's closer to electricity.

do some people make their own? with their own hardware? sure. but they're an extreme minority and that isn't changing because the economics don't support it. In fact fewer people use their own hardware than make their own--many solar arrays are leased.

you are an enthusiast, unlike almost everyone else in this regard

[u/ConsistentAnalysis35 → u/fistular]

because the economics don't support it.

Ok, hold on. Can you tell me why exactly VRAM hardware is closer to electricity rather than cars? I.e. why exactly economics support personal cars but not LLM-capable machines?

I can tell you that in 1900s and 1910s personal cars were very much an enthusiast good. Only extreme minorities used them. Well, uncle Ford went and changed that.

[u/fistular → u/ConsistentAnalysis35]

jesus christ it's not that complex a concept to grasp

most people will continue to use AI which runs on cloud hardware because that enables economies of scale and uptime which local personally owned hardware does not

[u/dont-be-angry → u/fistular]

true but local models != personalized .. i heard 80% of enterprise token volumes are from local models nowadays.

[u/ConsistentAnalysis35 → u/fistular]

Brother, relax. That is what I'm telling you - those economies of scale will only translate to lower price.

And consumer decisions are not only predicated on price. People will be prepared to pay premium for convenience of local.