undefined | Better HN

0 pointsheavyset_go3mo ago0 comments

Home calculators are cheap as they've ever been, but this era of computing is out of reach for the majority of people.

The analogous PC for this era requires a large amount of high speed memory and specialized inference hardware.

0 comments

What regular home workload are you thinking of that the computer I described is incapable of?

You can call a computer a calculator, but that doesn’t make it a calculator.

Can they run SOTA LLMs? No. Can they run smaller, yet still capable LLMs? Yes.

However, I don’t think that the ability to run SOTA LLMs is a reasonable expectation for “a computer in every home” just a few years into that software category even existing.

buu7003mo ago

It's kind of funny to see "a computer in every home" invoked when we're talking about the equivalent of ~$100 buying a non-trivial percentage of all computational power in existence at the time of the quote. By the standards of that time, we don't just have a computer in every home, we have a supercomputer in every pocket.

atonse3mo ago

You can have access to a supercomputer for pennies, internet access for very little money, and even an m4 Mac mini for $500. You can have a raspberry pi computer for even less. And buy a monitor for a couple hundred dollars.

I feel like you’re twisting the goalposts to make your point that it has to be local compute to have access to AI. Why does it need to be local?

Update: I take it back. You can get access to AI for free.

platevoltage3mo ago

No it doesn't. The majority of people aren't trying to run Ollama on their personal computers.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse