Recent post re: AI as utility
Myself, I’m a fan of local LLM / self hosted ML… but if you ever needed a clarion call that a hard pivot is coming (soon) for online/ cloud based AI…Altman et al are making some concerning mouth noises (to say nothing of broader concerns with OAI, Anthropic etc).
Right now, I’m sketching out a plan where my Raspberry Pi (always on, 2-3w) uses a magic packet to wake up my modest AI server (Lenovo P330 with Tesla P4) if/when needed (Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B); no point in chugging down 80-100w, 24/7 for no good reason.
If the trend continues the direction it appears to be (increasing costs, environmental impacts etc) then I’d feel a lot better hosting my own as port of first call and replacing simpler tasks with more traditional programs. YMMV.
I’d like to draw a comparison: a cozy wood fire versus central heating. In the right time and place (eg camping in the woods), a wood fire is both very practical and very useful. Meanwhile, most homes built in the past 70+ years in the USA have central heating (or are somewhere that doesn’t need heating at all) and the benefits are quite obvious: automatic temperature regulation, supplied by a utility, and low or no local emissions. And yet, there will still be rural homes that are heated exclusively by a wood stove, located in the middle of the living room, whose iron construction stores and radiates heat well after the fire has gone out.
Do I bemoan individual homes that use a wood fire? No, not really. The reality is that a grand, overwhelming majority of people don’t have wood fires anymore. Even when air quality is poor, prohibiting wood fires in a few rural homes isn’t exactly what would clear up the air.
Now, it would be a vastly different story if city-dwellers all had wood fires. When every home in a neighborhood is building and burning a wood fire, the results are disastrous: horrific PM2.5 in the air, soot coating everything, substantially reduced energy efficiency, and mass logging just to keep the wood supply. A mole-hill quickly becomes a mountain of problems when it’s at scale.
So to that end, I would very much like to see commercial-scale AI reigned in, as the external costs have already gotten out of hand. What they have built is more correctly called a wildfire, not a wood fire. But where does that leave small-scale AI/LLM users? They can weigh the cost/benefits for themselves, provided that they don’t harm other people or resources in the process.
But that brings us back to a cozy wood fire versus central heating: at small scale, a wood fire struggles to heat an entire modern American home (ie 2500 sq ft; or 232 sq m). Yet central heating does it with ease. Who then will be interested in this endeavor? Probably only those with a love for the camping aesthetic, and other enthusiasts.
At this point, it has become more clear what the utility of small LLM models is, and they do pale in comparison to larger LLM models. If small LLMs are what sensibly survives into the future, then that’s essentially a cap on their capabilities, given a want to avoid burning the planet to run anything larger. The only way out would be for substantial developments in the energy efficiency of small LLM models, but that’s not where the interest is.
No one is seeking to build a more efficient wood fire.
People are downvoting you, but I like your idea to draw analogy with heating, because it is something most of us rely on, and if LLMs and related technology will keep evolving as they do, probably most of us will rely on it more or less, sooner or later. Regardless of what AI haters would say.
But your wood fire/central heating analogy is bad. I would compare large LLM vendors to hot water heating utility common in Eastern Europe, and small LLMs to various heating devices. Utility companies can set prices, and decide who gets connected to hot water pipe, and set water temperature. There are regulations that limit the power of such utility companies, allow customers to choose the supplier, etc. Same should happen with LLM providers - competition and anti-monopoly laws should protect customers who choose to use them.
Alternatively, customers may choose not to use utility-supplied heating. They can purchase space heaters, hand warmers, install split systems, burn wood - they are free to pick technology, power source, size, appearance of such devices. They can take responsibility of heating their homes, willing to invest their time and money in order to be independent of central heating utility. Small LLMs are like that - people can run their own, with capabilities dependent on investment, or they can pay smaller providers or resellers to get more flexibility and/or privacy and avoid capital investments. They could spend time tuning small models and harnesses to do some simple tasks, and they wouldn’t need to “buy intelligence” from OpenAI and others.
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Damn, y’all livin’ lavvy.