Ask HN: How close are we to local LLMs being useful? What's the impact?

3•AbstractH24•1h ago

Feels to me like local models are an under-covered aspect of this whole AI boom.

If everything improves over time, at some point a good chunk of tasks won’t need to be done in data centers or be subject to the whims of a few frontier AI labs.

How close are we to that? Or is my thinking flawed?

Comments

buffer_overlord•1h ago

until its cheaper to train and infer than 100k gpu data centers...i doubt it will ever compete.

PaulHoule•1h ago

I do classification with SLMs and for my tasks when I have a few thousand samples the frontier models in zero-shot and few-shot modes are embarassingly bad in comparison.

david927•1h ago

I think we're past that point; they're absolutely useful already for a lot of tasks. I think it's about costs, convenience, and benefits of a frontier model for what you're doing.

AbstractH24•46m ago

Which ones are most useful? Any suggestions on where to go to start exploring this world?

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