Comment by RussianCow

8 hours ago

That likely isn't as relevant for on-device iPhone usage as it is for Real Work™. I won't notice the difference between 50tps and 1000tps when asking Siri a question.

I don't know. As others have said, the Taalas chip wasn't small, or particularly low power, so it's hard to "imagine" what that tech in an cell phone chip might look like.

But if the basic premise of "good enough LLM at insane throughput" holds, I think it could qualitatively change local uses of LLMs. At a certain speed point, you're able to move from request -> response to a cascade of tool calling and "subagents", which could allow a small model to be much more useful, if provided with a lot of local data and tool calls.

That said, this is assuming you could stuff a "good enough" model into a phone with Taalas-like technology. The Taalas tech demo was an 8B parameter model and required hundreds of watts (IIRC) to run. The efficiency was good given the speed (as I understand), but it's not clear at all that the approach scales small enough to be a sensible coprocessor on an iPhone or whatever.

  • > At a certain speed point, you're able to move from request -> response to a cascade of tool calling and "subagents"

    That also needs server class hardware though. A phone won’t happily service the insane amount of IO, compute, and network that this cascade would require.

But wouldn't higher tps allow for more reasoning or other hidden processes, potententially making a smarter model?

  • This is my thought as well. Models have to be intentional about which tokens they burn because there's a real lag time. If you can just fork out 10 different reasoning sessions at once with no regard for token waste/lag, you can compensate a smaller model with just doing more at once with it. No idea if this is reasonably true though.

    • I think that only works if you have checkpoints where all that reasoning can be checked against reality. Otherwise you get an army of armchair experts. LLMs are hilariously bad at home improvement advice btw, where reasoning alone won’t get you far.

That order of magnitude could be the difference between "the users wants me to open the notes app, let's open it" and "I've scanned all your notes before you could blink and found what you're looking for".

If Siri is using a 3T model in high reasoning mode to answer your question you will.