Comment by saltysalt
4 days ago
Not sure the dial-up analogy fits, instead I tend to think we are in the mainframe period of AI, with large centralised computing models that are so big and expensive to host, only a few corporations can afford to do so. We rent a computing timeshare from them (tokens = punch cards).
I look forward to the "personal computing" period, with small models distributed everywhere...
> I look forward to the "personal computing" period, with small models distributed everywhere...
One could argue that this period was just a brief fluke. Personal computers really took off only in the 1990s, web 2.0 happened in the mid-2000s. Now, for the average person, 95%+ of screen time boils down to using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud".
The personal computing era happened partly because, while there were demands for computing, users' connectivity to the internet were poor or limited and so they couldn't just connect to the mainframe. We now have high speed internet access everywhere - I don't know what would drive the equivalent of the era of personal computing this time.
> We now have high speed internet access everywhere
As I travel a ton, I can confidently tell you, that this is still not true at all, and I’m kinda disappointed that the general rule of optimizing for bad reception died.
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Privacy. I absolutely will not ever open my personal files to an LLM over the web, and even with my mid-tier M4 Macbook I’m close to a point where I don’t have to. I wonder how much the cat is out of the back for private companies in this regard. I don’t believe the AI companies founded on stealing IP have stopped.
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> I don't know what would drive the equivalent of the era of personal computing this time.
Space.
You don't want to wait 3-22 minutes for a ping from Mars.
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Privacy, reliable access when not connected to the web, the principal of decentralizing for some. Less supply chain risk for private enterprise.
Centralized only became mainstream when everything started to be offered "for free". When it was buy or pay recurrently more often the choice was to buy.
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> We now have high speed internet access everywhere
This is such a HN comment illustrating how little your average HN knows of the world beyond their tech bubble. Internet everywhere, you might have something of a point. But "high speed internet access everywhere" sounds like "I haven't travelled much in my life".
I don't know, I think you're conflating content streaming with central compute.
Also, is percentage of screentime the relevant metric? We moved TV consumption to the PC, does that take away from PCs?
Many apps moved to the web but that's basically just streamed code to be run in a local VM. Is that a dumb terminal? It's not exactly local compute independent...
Nah, your parent comment has a valid point.
Nearly entirety of the use cases of computers today don't involve running things on a 'personal computer' in any way.
In fact these days, every one kind of agrees as little as hosting a spreadsheet on your computer is a bad idea. Cloud, where everything is backed up is the way to go.
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> I don't know, I think you're conflating content streaming with central compute.
Would you classify eg gmail as 'content streaming'?
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> using the computer as a dumb terminal to access centralized services "in the cloud"
Our personal devices are far from thin clients.
Depends on the app, and the personal device. Mobile devices are increasingly thin clients. Of course hardware-wise they are fully capable personal computers, but ridiculous software-imposed limitations make that increasingly difficult.
"Thin" can be interpreted as relative, no?
I think it depends on if you see the browser for content or as a runtime environment.
Maybe it depends on the application architecture...? I.e., a compute-heavy WASM SPA at one end vs a server-rendered website.
Or is it an objective measure?
But that is what they are mostly used for.
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Speak for yourself. Many people don't daily-drive anything more advanced than an iPad.
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I mean, Chromebooks really aren't very far at all from thin clients. But even my monster ROG laptop when it's not gaming is mostly displaying the results of computation that happened elsewhere
There are more PCs and serious home computing setups today than there were back then. There are just way way way more casual computer users.
The people who only use phones and tablets or only use laptops as dumb terminals are not the people who were buying PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, or they were they were not serious users. They were mostly non-computer-users.
Non-computer-users have become casual consumer level computer users because the tech went mainstream, but there's still a massive serious computer user market. I know many people with home labs or even small cloud installations in their basements, but there are about as many of them as serious PC users with top-end PC setups in the late 1980s.
I dislike the view of individuals as passive sufferers of the preferences of big corporations.
You can and people do self-host stuff that big tech wants pushed into the cloud.
You can have a NAS, a private media player, Home Assistant has been making waves in the home automation sphere. Turns out people don't like buying overpriced devices only to have to pay a $20 subscription, and find out their devices don't talk to each other, upload footage inside of their homes to the cloud, and then get bricked once the company selling them goes under and turns of the servers.
This. And the hordes of people reacting with some explanation for why this is. The 'why' is not the point, we already know the 'why'. The point is that you can if you want. Might not be easy, might not be convenient, but that's not the point. No one has to ask someone else for permission to use other tech than big tech.
The explanation of 'why' is not an argument. Big tech is not making it easy != it's impossible. Passive sufferers indeed.
Edit: got a website with an RSS feed somewhere maybe? I would like to follow more people with a point of view like yours.
You can dislike it but it doesn't make it less true and getting truer.
You can likewise host models if you so choose. Still the vast majority of people use online services both for personal computing or for LLMs.
Things are moving this way because it’s convenient and easy and most people today are time poor.
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I look forward to a possibility where the dumb terminal is less centralized in the cloud, and more how it seems to work in the expanse. They all have hand terminals that seem to automatically interact with the systems and networks of the ship/station/building they're in. Linking up with local resources, and likely having default permissions set to restrict weird behavior.
Not sure it could really work like that IRL, but I haven't put a ton of thought into it. It'd make our always-online devices make a little more sense.
But for a broader definition of "personal computer", the number of computers we have has only continued to skyrocket - phones, watches, cars, TVs, smart speakers, toaster ovens, kids' toys...
I'm with GP - I imagine a future when capable AI models become small and cheap enough to run locally in all kinds of contexts.
https://notes.npilk.com/ten-thousand-agents
Depending on how you are defining AI models, they already do. Think of the $15 security camera that can detect people and objects. That is AI model driven. LLM's are another story, but smaller, less effective ones can and do already run at the edge.
I think that speaks more to the fact that software ate the world, than locality of compute. It's a breadth first, depth last game.
Makes me want to unplug and go back to offline social media. That's a joke. The dominant effect was networked applications getting developed, enabling community, not a shift back to client terminals.
Once up on a time social media was called Usenet and worked offline in a dedicated client with a standard protocol. You only went online to download and send messages, but could then go offline and read them in an app of your choice.
Web2.0 discarded the protocol approach and turned your computer into a thin client that does little more than render webapps that require you to be permanently online.
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I guess we're in the kim-1 era of local models, or is that already done?
That 'average' is doing a lot of work to obfuscate the landscape. Open source continues to grow (indicating a robust ecosystem of individuals who use their computers for local work) and more importantly, the 'average' looks like it does not necessarily due to a reduction in local use, but to an explosion of users that did not previously exist (mobile first, SAAS customers, etc.)
The thing we do need to be careful about is regulatory capture. We could very well end up with nothing but monolithic centralized systems simply because it's made illegal to distribute, use, and share open models. They hinted quite strongly that they wanted to do this with deepseek.
There may even be a case to be made that at some point in the future, small local models will outperform monoliths - if distributed training becomes cheap enough, or if we find an alternative to backprop that allows models to learn as they infer (like a more developed forward-forward or something like it), we may see models that do better simply because they aren't a large centralized organism behind a walled garden. I'll grant that this is a fairly polyanna take and represents the best possible outcome but it's not outlandishly fantastic - and there is good reason to believe that any system based on a robust decentralized architecture would be more resilient to problems like platform enshittification and overdeveloped censorship.
At the end of the day, it's not important what the 'average' user is doing, so long as there are enough non-average users pushing the ball forward on the important stuff.
We already have monolithic centralised systems.
Most open source development happens on GitHub.
You'd think non-average developers would have noticed their code is now hosted by Microsoft, not the FSF. But perhaps not.
The AI end game is likely some kind of post-Cambrian, post-capitalist soup of evolving distributed compute.
But at the moment there's no conceivable way for local and/or distributed systems to have better performance and more intelligence.
Local computing has latency, bandwidth, and speed/memory limits, and general distributed computing isn't even a thing.
I can't imagine a universe where a small mind with limited computing resources has an advantage against a datacenter mind, no matter the architecture.
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Even the most popular games (with few exceptions) present as relatively dumb terminals that need constant connectivity to sync every activity to a mainframe - not necessarily because it's an MMO or multiplayer game, but because it's the industry standard way to ensure fairness. And by fairness, of course, I mean the optimization of enforcing "grindiness" as a mechanism to sell lootboxes and premium subscriptions.
And AI just further normalizes the need for connectivity; cloud models are likely to improve faster than local models, for both technical and business reasons. They've got the premium-subscriptions model down. I shudder to think what happens when OpenAI begins hiring/subsuming-the-knowledge-of "revenue optimization analysts" from the AAA gaming world as a way to boost revenue.
But hey, at least you still need humans, at some level, if your paperclip optimizer is told to find ways to get humans to spend money on "a sense of pride and accomplishment." [0]
We do not live in a utopia.
[0] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/503152-mo... - https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
I imagine there are plenty of indie single-player games that work just fine offline. You lose cloud saves and achievements, but everything else still works.
Funny you would pick this analogy. I feel like we’re back in the mainframe era. A lot of software can’t operate without an internet connection. Even if in practice they execute some of the code on your device, a lot of the data and the heavyweight processing is already happening on the server. Even basic services designed from the ground up to be distributed and local first - like email (“downloading”) - are used in this fashion - like gmail. Maps apps added offline support years after they launched and still cripple the search. Even git has GitHub sitting in the middle and most people don’t or can’t use git any other way. SaaS, Electron, …etc. have brought us back to the mainframe era.
It's always struck me as living in some sort of bizaro world. We now have these super powerful personal computers, both handheld (phones) and laptops (My M4 Pro smokes even some desktop class processors) and yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...be a dumb terminal to someone else's computer.
I had always hoped we'd do more locally on-device (and with native apps, not running 100 instances of chromium for various electron apps). But, it's hard to extract rent that way I suppose.
What's truly wild when you think about it, is that the computer on the other end is often less powerful than your personal laptop.
I access websites on a 64gb, 16 core device. I deploy them to a 16gb, 4 core server.
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I don't even understand why computer and phone manufacturers even try to make their devices faster anymore, since for most computing tasks, the bottleneck is all the data that needs to be transferred to and from the modern version of the mainframe.
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I think people have been finding more compelling use cases for the fact that information systems can be multi-player now than for marginal FLOPS. Client-server is just a very effective way of organizing multi-player information systems.
yet I use all this powerful compute hardware to...animate liquid glass
> A lot of software can’t operate without an internet connection
Or even physical things like mattresses, according to discussions around the recent AWS issues.
Why would companies sell you the golden goose when they can instead sell you an egg every day?
> Why would companies sell you the golden goose when they can instead sell you an egg every day?
Because someone else can sell the goose and take your market.
Apple is best aligned to be the disruptor. But I wouldn’t underestimate the Chinese government dumping top-tier open-source models on the internet to take our tech companies down a notch or ten.
Sure, the company that launched iTunes and killed physical media, then released a phone where you can't install apps ("the web is the apps") will be the disruptor to bring back local computing to users...
By that logic none of us should be paying monthly subscriptions for anything because obviously someone would disrupt that pricing model and take business away from all the tech companies who are charging it? Especially since personal computers and mobile devices get more and more powerful and capable with every passing year. Yet subscriptions also get more prevalent every year.
If Apple does finally come up with a fully on-device AI model that is actually useful, what makes you think they won't gate it behind a $20/mo subscription like they do for everything else?
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> Apple is best aligned to be the disruptor.
It's this disruptor Apple in the room with us now?
Apple's second biggest money source is services. You know, subscriptions. And that source keeps growing: https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-bes...
It's also that same Apple that fights tooth and nail every single attempt to let people have the goose or even the promise of a goose. E.g. by saying that it's entitled to a cut even if a transaction didn't happen through Apple.
Unfortunately, most people just want eggs, not the burden of actually owning the goose.
Putting a few boots in Taiwan would also make for a profitable short. Profitable to the tune of several trillion dollars. Xi must be getting tempted.
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You could say the same thing about Computers when they were mostly mainframe. I am sure someone will figure out how to make it commoditized just like personal computers and internet.
An interesting remark: in the 1950s-1970s, mainframes were typically rented rather than sold.
It looks to me like the personal computer area is over. Everything is in the cloud and accessed through terminals like phones and tablets.
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Because someone else will sell it to you if they dont.
Because companies are not some monolith, all doing identical things forever. If someone sees a new angle to make money, they'll start doing it.
Data General and Unisys did not create PCs - small disrupters did that. These startups were happy to sell eggs.
They didn't create them, but PC startups like Apple and Commodore only made inroads into the home -- a relatively narrow market compared to business. It took IBM to legitimize PCs as business tools.
Well if there's at least one competitor selling golden geese to consumers the rest have to adapt.
Assuming consumers even bother to set up a coop in their living room...
Your margin is my opportunity. The more expensive centralized models get the easier it is for distributed models to compete.
Exactly! It's a rent-seeking model.
> I look forward to the "personal computing" period, with small models distributed everywhere...
Like the web, which worked out great?
Our Internet is largely centralized platforms. Built on technology controlled by trillion dollar titans.
Google somehow got the lion share of browser usage and is now dictating the direction of web tech, including the removal of adblock. The URL bar defaults to Google search, where the top results are paid ads.
Your typical everyday person uses their default, locked down iPhone or Android to consume Google or Apple platform products. They then communicate with their friends over Meta platforms, Reddit, or Discord.
The decentralized web could never outrun money. It's difficult to out-engineer hundreds of thousands of the most talented, most highly paid engineers that are working to create these silos.
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When the consumer decides to discover my site and fund federated and P2P infrastructure, they can have a seat at the table.
Selling fertile geese was a winning and proven business biz model for a very long time.
Selling eggs is better how?
We have a ton of good, small models. The issues are:
1. Most people don't have machines that can run even midsized local models well
2. The local models are nearly as good as the frontier models for a lot of use cases
3. There are technical hurdles to running local models that will block 99% of people. Even if the steps are: download LM Studio and download a model
Maybe local models will get so good that they cover 99% of normal user use cases and it'll be like using your phone/computer to edit a photo. But you'll still need something to make it automatic enough that regular people use it by default.
That said, anyone reading this is almost certainly technical enough to run a local model. I would highly recommend trying some. Very neat to know it's entirely run from your machine and seeing what it can do. LM Studio is the most brainless way to dip your toes in.
As the hype is dying down it's becoming a little bit clearer that AI isn't like blockchain and might be actually useful (for non generative purposes at least)
I'm curious what counts as a midsize model; 4B, 8B, or something larger/smaller?
What models would you recommend? I have 12GB of vram so anything larger than 8B might be really slow, but i am not sure
My take:
Large: Requires >128GB VRAM
Medium: 32-128GB VRAM
Small: 16GB VRAM
Micro: Runs on a microcontroller or GPUs with just 4GB of VRAM
There's really nothing worthwhile for general use cases that runs in under 16GB (from my testing) except a grammar-checking model that I can't remember the name of at the moment.
gpt-oss:20b runs on 16GB of VRAM and it's actually quite good (for coding, at least)! Especially with Python.
Prediction: The day that your average gaming PC comes with 128GB of VRAM is the day developers will stop bothering with cloud-based AI services. gpt-oss:120b is nearly as good as gpt5 and we're still at the beginning of the AI revolution.
It can depend on your use case. Are you editing a large code base and will thus make lots of completion requests with large contexts?
Try WebLLM - it's pretty decent and all in-browser/offline even for light tasks, 1B-1.5B models like Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B-Instruct. I put together a quick prototype - CodexLocal.com but you can essentially a local nginx and use webllm as an offline app. Of course, you can just use Ollama / LM Studio but that would require a more technical solution
I like to think of it more broadly, and that we are currently in the era of the first automobile. [0]
LLMs are the internal combustion engine, and chatbot UIs are at the "horseless carriage" phase.
My personal theory is that even if models stopped making major advancements, we would find cheaper and more useful ways to use them. In the end, our current implementations will look like the automobile pictured below.
[0] https://group.mercedes-benz.com/company/tradition/company-hi...
I'm not a big google fan, but I really like the "Google AI Edge Gallery" android app [0]. In particular, I've been chatting with the "Gemma-3n-E2B-it" model when I don't have an internet connection, and it's really decent!
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ai....
Don't we already have small models highly distributed?
We do, but the vast majority of users interact with centralised models from Open AI, Google Gemini, Grok...
I'm not sure we can look forward to self-hosted models ever being mainstream.
Like 50% of internet users are already interacting with one of these daily.
You usually only change your habit when something is substantially better.
I don't know how free versions are going to be smaller, run on commodity hardware, take up trivial space and ram etc, AND be substantially better
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Because small models are just not that good.
The vast majority won't switch until there's a 10x use case. We know they are coming. Why bother hopping?
I use gpt4all and have downloaded some models. It's not that hard, and doesn't take a huge system. It's pretty easy if you use models on their list, it's a bit more work to find the right chat interactive script (forgot what they are called) for your class of model if you downloaded one that's not on the list, but not that hard. I have 8GB VRAM, and it's slow but they work. I like that it's local and private, but then I don't use them for much other than as an oddity that is fun to interact with.
Mainframes still exist, and they actually make a lot of sense from physics perspective. It's good idea to run transactions in a big machine rather than distributed, the latter is less energy efficient.
I think the misconception is that things cannot be overpriced for reasons other than inefficiency.
Dial-up + mainframe. Mainframe from POV as silos, dial-up internet as the speed we have now when looking back to 2025 in 2035.
We are also in the mainframe period of computing, with large centralised cloud services.
I actually think we are much closer to the sneaker era of shoes, or the monorail era of public transit.
this -- chips are getting fast enough both arm n x86. unified memory architecture means we can get more ram on devices at faster throughput. we're already seeing local models - just that their capability is limited by ram.
I think we are in the dotcom boom era where investment is circular and the cash investments all depend on the idea that growth is infinite.
Just a bunch of billionaires jockeying for not being poor.
ollama and other peojects already make this possible
> "personal computing" period
The period when you couldn't use Linux as your main OS because your organization asked for .doc files?
No thanks.
I actually don’t look forward to this period. I have always been for open source software and distributism — until AI.
Because if there’s one thing worse than governments having nuclear weapons, it’s everyone having them.
It would be chaos. And with physical drones and robots coming, it woukd be even worse. Think “shitcoins and memecoins” but unlike those, you don’t just lose the money you put in and you can’t opt out. They’d affect everyone, and you can never escape the chaos ever again. They’d be posting around the whole Internet (including here, YouTube deepfakes, extortion, annoyance, constantly trying to rewrite history, get published, reputational destruction at scale etc etc), and constant armies of bots fighting. A dark forest.
And if AI can pay for its own propagation via decentralized hosting and inference, then the chance of a runaway advanced persistent threat compounds. It just takes a few bad apples, or even practical jokers, to unleash crazy stuff. And it will never be shut down, just build and build like some kind of kessler syndrome. And I’m talking about with just CURRENT AI agent and drone technology.
Imagine small models on a cheap chip that can be added to anything (alarm clock, electric toothbrush, car keys...)
I mean, people can self-host plenty off of a 5090, heck even Macs with enough RAM can run larger models that I can't run on a 5090.