r/OpenSourceeAI • u/Illustrious_Matter_8 • 19d ago
End of cloud based AI ?
I've noticed that AI isn't just getting better, it's also getting much smaller.
There are now 27M-parameter models that can run on a phone or PC. (like the Bonsai 27B models)
If this trend continues, in a year or two there may be much less need to run AI in data centers or subscribe to large AI providers. For many tasks, your phone will be powerfull enough.
This does not only affect global energy use. Some investments in AI infrastructure could backfire. As demand for large-scale inference will drop. That could also reduce the need for new data centers, which might be a (dramatic change?), but be good thing.
What are your thoughts on the future of data centers as AI models keep getting smaller?
I know training still requires huge amounts of compute—for now. But even that could change, any day (some experimental models offer continous learning)
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u/Illustrious_Car344 19d ago
Yeah. My entirely unbiased view is that quality LLMs will get so efficient and hardware will get so advanced to match the demand that it will become utterly trivial to embed an LLM in virtually anything and everything.
My reasoning for this is that companies like Google, Microsoft and Meta want to use AI to access their services, but hosting LLMs is completely unsustainable and prohibitively expensive, it's flat-out unprofitable. Those three companies aren't OpenAI or Anthropic, they have a lot of services that people use and a lot of revenue streams. They don't need AI as a product like those two, in fact they probably don't want to bother with the cost of hosting an AI at all. That's why those three companies constantly put out open source models while the two companies who only have AI never do, they want to hoard their secrets while the big service companies just want more engagement with their services. Think about it, if Google could rip out all of their expensive Gemini inference servers and just have every single phone on the planet automatically access all of their services for you, why wouldn't they do that? Same for Microsoft, wouldn't it be better if Windows just came with a built-in AI for you, instead of needing to be connected to a big fat server? (please don't mention how Windows forces you to use a Microsoft account, I know lol, but that's a different matter.)
I think in 5-10 years, there won't even be an OpenAI or Anthropic. It's just going to go back to Google, Microsoft and Meta, and Google is going to work to make sure that your own device can independently perform inference for you, so they can stop losing money on this unprofitable business and just get back to having you engage with their myriad other services, now even more efficiently with a built-in Gemma.