Comment by kioku
4 months ago
I’m just wondering how this translates to computer manufacturers like Apple. Could we have these kinds of chips built directly into computers within three years? With insanely fast, local on-demand performance comparable to today’s models?
Is it possible to supplement the model with a diff for updates on modular memory, or would severely impact perf?
I imagine you could do something like a LORA
this design at 7 transistors per weight is 99.9% burnt in the silicon forever.
and run an outdated model for 3 years while progress is exponential? what is the point of that
When output is good enough, other considerations become more important. Most people on this planet cannot afford even an AI subscription, and cost of tokens is prohibitive to many low margin businesses. Privacy and personalization matter too, data sovereignty is a hot topic. Besides, we already see how focus has shifted to orchestration, which can be done on CPU and is cheap - software optimizations may compensate hardware deficiencies, so it’s not going to be frozen. I think the market for local hardware inference is bigger than for clouds, and it’s going to repeat Android vs iOS story.
This is the same justification that was used to ship the (now almost entirely defunct) NPUs on Apple and Android devices alike.
The A18 iPhone chip has 15b transistors for the GPU and CPU; the Taalas ASIC has 53b transistors dedicated to inference alone. If it's anything like NPUs, almost all vendors will bypass the baked-in silicon to use GPU acceleration past a certain point. It makes much more sense to ship a CUDA-style flexible GPGPU architecture.
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Taalas is more expensive than NPUs not less. You have GPU/NPU at home; just use it.
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Is progress still exponential? Feels like its flattening to me, it is hard to quantify but if you could get Opus 4.2 to work at the speed of the Taalas demo and run locally I feel like I'd get an awful lot done.
Bake in a Genius Bar employee, trained on your model's hardware, whose entire reason for existence is to fix your computer when it breaks. If it takes an extra 50 cents of die space but saves Apple a dollar of support costs over the lifetime of the device, it's worth it.
Yeah, the space moves so quickly that I would not want to couple the hardware with a model that might be outdated in a month. There are some interesting talking points but a general purpose programmable asic makes more sense to me.
It won’t stay exponential forever.
> what is the point of that
Planned obsolescence? /s
Jokes aside, they can make the "LLM chip" removable. I know almost nothing is replaceable in MacBooks, but this could be an exception.