Nadella maybe knows a lot more than any of us about LLMs/GenAI tech, but one doesn’t need to know anything about LLMs (or even technology) to know that an oligarch like Nadella cannot be trusted (in any context).
I’m kind of more-sympathetic to Microsoft than to some of the other companies involved.
Microsoft is trying to leverage the Windows platform that they control to do local LLM use. I’m not at all sure that there’s actually enough memory out there to do that, or that it’s cost-effective to put a ton of memory and compute capacity in everyone’s home rather than time-sharing hardware in datacenters. Nor am I sold that laptops — which many “Copilot PCs” are — are a fantastic place to be doing a lot of heavyweight parallel compute.
But…from a privacy standpoint, I kind of would like local LLMs to be at least available, even if they aren’t as affordable as cloud-based stuff. And at least Microsoft is at least supporting that route. A lot of companies are going to be oriented towards just doing AI stuff in the cloud.
If Microsoft cared about privacy then they wouldn’t have made windows practically spyware. Even if they install AI locally in the OS, it’s still proprietary software that constantly sends data back to the mothership, consuming your electricity and RAM to do so. Linux has so many options, there’s really no reason not to switch.
Small LLMs already exist for local self-hosting, and there are open-source options which won’t steal your data and turn you into a product.
Bear in mind that the number of parameters your system can handle is limited by how much memory is available, and using a quantized version can increase the number of parameters you can handle with the same amount of memory.
Unless you have some really serious hardware, 24 billion parameters is probably the maximum that would be practical for self-hosting on a reasonable hobbyist set-up. But I’m no expert, so do some research and calculate for yourself what your system can handle.
They’re trying to leverage their windows platform to seek rent (sell premium cloud services like LLM access) for shit people don’t even want because they aren’t satisfied making very respectable money on licenses.
Isn’t that the whole shtick of the AI PCs no one wanted? Like, isn’t there some kind of non-GPU co-processor that runs the local models more efficiently than the CPU?
I don’t really want local LLMs but I won’t begrudge those who do. Still, I wouldn’t trust any proprietary system’s local LLMs to not feed back personal info for “product improvement” (which for AI is your data to train on).
Copilot+ PCs are a new class of Windows 11 hardware powered by a high-performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU) — a specialized computer chip for AI-intensive processes like real-time translations and image generation—that can perform more than 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
It’s not…terribly beefy. Like, I have a Framework Desktop with an APU and 128GB of memory that schlorps down 120W or something, substantially outdoes what you’re going to do on a laptop. And that in turn is weaker computationally than something like the big Nvidia hardware going into datacenters.
Microsoft wants developers to have local access to models but end users are 100% corralled into OneDrive and Copilot. I’m not sympathetic to them at all.
I wouldn’t trust a local LLM solution from a large American company. Not saying that they would try to “pull a quick one”, but they are unreliable and corrupt.
Nadella maybe knows a lot more than any of us about LLMs/GenAI tech, but one doesn’t need to know anything about LLMs (or even technology) to know that an oligarch like Nadella cannot be trusted (in any context).
yeah idk about that first part
Power corrupts, we’ve know this since the dawn of time
I’m kind of more-sympathetic to Microsoft than to some of the other companies involved.
Microsoft is trying to leverage the Windows platform that they control to do local LLM use. I’m not at all sure that there’s actually enough memory out there to do that, or that it’s cost-effective to put a ton of memory and compute capacity in everyone’s home rather than time-sharing hardware in datacenters. Nor am I sold that laptops — which many “Copilot PCs” are — are a fantastic place to be doing a lot of heavyweight parallel compute.
But…from a privacy standpoint, I kind of would like local LLMs to be at least available, even if they aren’t as affordable as cloud-based stuff. And at least Microsoft is at least supporting that route. A lot of companies are going to be oriented towards just doing AI stuff in the cloud.
If Microsoft cared about privacy then they wouldn’t have made windows practically spyware. Even if they install AI locally in the OS, it’s still proprietary software that constantly sends data back to the mothership, consuming your electricity and RAM to do so. Linux has so many options, there’s really no reason not to switch.
Small LLMs already exist for local self-hosting, and there are open-source options which won’t steal your data and turn you into a product.
https://huggingface.co/spaces/open-llm-leaderboard/open_llm_leaderboard#/
Bear in mind that the number of parameters your system can handle is limited by how much memory is available, and using a quantized version can increase the number of parameters you can handle with the same amount of memory.
Unless you have some really serious hardware, 24 billion parameters is probably the maximum that would be practical for self-hosting on a reasonable hobbyist set-up. But I’m no expert, so do some research and calculate for yourself what your system can handle.
They’re trying to leverage their windows platform to seek rent (sell premium cloud services like LLM access) for shit people don’t even want because they aren’t satisfied making very respectable money on licenses.
Is that true? I haven’t heard MS say anything about enabling local LLMs. Genuinely curious and would like to know more.
Isn’t that the whole shtick of the AI PCs no one wanted? Like, isn’t there some kind of non-GPU co-processor that runs the local models more efficiently than the CPU?
I don’t really want local LLMs but I won’t begrudge those who do. Still, I wouldn’t trust any proprietary system’s local LLMs to not feed back personal info for “product improvement” (which for AI is your data to train on).
NPU neural processing unit
That’s why they have the “Copilot PC” hardware requirement, because they’re using an NPU on the local machine.
searches
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/npu-devices/
It’s not…terribly beefy. Like, I have a Framework Desktop with an APU and 128GB of memory that schlorps down 120W or something, substantially outdoes what you’re going to do on a laptop. And that in turn is weaker computationally than something like the big Nvidia hardware going into datacenters.
But it is doing local computation.
Microsoft wants developers to have local access to models but end users are 100% corralled into OneDrive and Copilot. I’m not sympathetic to them at all.
I wouldn’t trust a local LLM solution from a large American company. Not saying that they would try to “pull a quick one”, but they are unreliable and corrupt.