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thot_experimentyesterday at 8:00 AM1 replyview on HN

No, it isn't. I am saying that the set of tasks that can be completed by Opus 4.7 has a surprisingly large overlap with the set of tasks that can be completed by Gemma 31B. It is meaningfully equivalent in many cases.

(of course if i'm being honest 640kB is fine, i'm sure tons of the world's commerce is handled by less for example, the delta between a system with 640kb of ram and a modern one is near nil for many people, the UX on a PoS terminal does not require more than that for example, the hacker news UX could also be roughly the same)


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lioetersyesterday at 12:47 PM

> 640kB is fine

How refreshing to hear this kind of old-school hacker thinking, in a thread where most people have given up on local computing in exchange for convenience and permanent third-party dependency.

With embedded systems affordable and ubiquitous, hopefully a growing segment of the new generation will also learn to push the limit of available hardware and see how far we can take it. As an engineer there's a satisfaction in solving things with what you got.

There's a new technique, 1-bit family of language models that can achieve up to 9x memory efficiency compared to existing models. Still multiple gigabytes for practical use I imagine, but it's great progress toward local AI, which I believe will be common in the near future. https://prismml.com/news/ternary-bonsai