I would still pay ~500 for a chip that runs 10kt/s of a ~100b model on my machine even if the half life is 6months. I m sure my employer would too.

Qwwen3.5 122b was released 6 months ago and is still best in class overall 100-140 B param model.

> The absolute worst market time to etch a model to a chip is right now

Slightly disagree. It really depends on the price-point at which they can do that etching. ~1k usd / ~30B model in a hdd-sized case that fits on your desk? I'd buy one right now, even knowing that I'm "stuck" with whatever model of the day is.

> It's 1998: hey, I can drastically speed up your web service, let's etch it right to silicon.

I distinctly remember 32-bit/33 MHz PCI accelerator cards for SSL being a real thing (for use on OpenBSD or FreeBSD), in an era when something like a single core 700 MHz Pentium 3 1U system was a relatively powerful individual bare metal httpd box.

http://www.aster.si/partnerji/compaq/atalla/axl200.html

The CPU load of doing a lot of SSL purely in software was a problem in terms of scaling things up, so this was one attempt at a (very short lived) solution. Note that this predated TLS1.0.

The 500x efficiency gain makes their approach a no brainer. Just make a new chip every 6 months, you still win.

I just want to but hardware so I can run a model at home that is fast. I don't see myself installing a server that burns almost two hundred kilowatts but maybe a card which runs a 27B Qwen...

maybe AMD wants the IP to deploy it once ai model development slows down in a few years. Or, their large cloud customers do want to burn through silicon, basically paying rent to AMD for models etched on silicon.

Etched model into a chip? A… mobile chip eventually? Seems prescient.

It's 2026: let's etch nginx into silicon and get 10,000,000 rps at a cost of 0.1 US/day.

Yes, please!