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.
Agree. And re small models - very agree. In fact I made a ablated version of Qwen 3.5-2B for use with my pi, before thinking a bit harder and realising I can probably code something bespoke that doesn’t need a stochastic parrot as a squwake box at all.
https://huggingface.co/BobbyLLM/polaris-heretic-Q4_K_M-GGUF
Still, as a SLM, it’s perfectly cromulent and does well with tool calling etc which is what I wanted it for.