In my regular research (behind a paywall), I have been saying for a while that I think the future of AI is not large language models (LLM), but small language models (SLM) run on local desktop computers or even mobile phones.
I’m really interested to see what comes of the LLM ASIC idea - it worked wonders for hardware video codecs. I could see the smartphone industry picking up again on annual releases worthy of upgrades if they included dedicated AI chips not beholden to a cloud subscription. I think we’re reaching the point that the frontier models are becoming “good enough” to use for a while before uploading to the next.
That’s kind of what I’m expecting going forward too. Local models will get good enough in a year or two for most tasks, and then you just have a specialized chip like the GPU to run them.
I’m really interested to see what comes of the LLM ASIC idea - it worked wonders for hardware video codecs. I could see the smartphone industry picking up again on annual releases worthy of upgrades if they included dedicated AI chips not beholden to a cloud subscription. I think we’re reaching the point that the frontier models are becoming “good enough” to use for a while before uploading to the next.
That’s kind of what I’m expecting going forward too. Local models will get good enough in a year or two for most tasks, and then you just have a specialized chip like the GPU to run them.
NPU’s have been in phone SoCs for years now.