I think I have almost the opposite intuition. The fact that attention models are capable of making sophisticated logical constructions within a recursive grammar, even for a simple DSL like SQL, is kind of surprising. I think it’s likely that this property does depend on training on a very large and more general corpus, and hence demands the full parameter space that we need for conversational writing.
I don’t understand why today’s laptops are so large. Some of the smallest "ultrabooks" getting coverage sit at 13 inches, but even this seems pretty big to me.
If you need raw compute, I totally get it. Things like compiling the Linux kernel or training local models require a high level of thermal headroom, and the chassis has to dissipate heat in a manner that prevents throttling. In cases where you want the machine to act like a portable workstation, it makes sense that the form factor would need to be a little juiced up.
That said, computing is a whole lot more than just heavy development work. There are some domains that have a tightly-scoped set of inputs and require the user to interact in a very simple way. Something like responding to an email is a good example — typing "LGTM" requires a very small screen area, and it requires no physical keyboard or active cooling. checking the weather is similar: you don’t need 16 inches of screen real estate to go from wondering if it’s raining to seeing a cloud icon.
I say all this because portability is expensive. Not only is it expensive in terms of back pain — maintaining the ecosystem required to run these machines gets pretty complicated. You either end up shelling out money for specialized backpacks or fighting for outlet space at a coffee shop just to keep the thing running. In either case, you’re paying big money (and calorie) costs every time a user types remind me to eat a sandwich.
I think the future will be full of much smaller devices. Some hardware to build these already exists, and you can even fit them in your pocket. This mode of deployment is inspiring to me, and I’m optimistic about a future where 6.1 inches is all you need.
Try being over 30 sitting at a desk your while life and then try and use a 13” screen. Eye strain is a huge deal.
My opinion on this changed drastically when I started interacting with people outside of tech and not my own age. A device you struggle to see is miserable.
Still relevant today. Many problems people throw onto LLMs can be done more efficiently with text completion than begging a model 20x the size (and probably more than 20x the cost) to produce the right structured output. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1859qry/is_anyo...
My threshold for “does not need to be smaller” is “can this run on a Raspberry Pi”. This is a helpful benchmark for maximum likely useful optimization.
> I think the future will be full of much smaller models trained to do specific tasks.
This was the very recent past! Up until we got LLM-crazy in 2021, this was the primary thing that deep learning papers produced: New models meant to solve very specific tasks.
The net $5.5T the fed printed had to go somewhere. AI Arms Race was the answer. And when the models got good, then we needed agentic to create unbounded demand for inference just as there was unbounded demand for training.
The graph is horrifying. Before the 2008 crisis, less than $1 trillion. By the time of the 2020 crisis, it had hit 4, then in the next few years more than doubled to $9 trillion. It may contribute to explaining why the rich are swimming in free money while the underclass can't afford to live anymore. With AI eating up the job market, we seem to be headed for another even bigger crisis.
Im always so surprised that embedding models we had for years like minlm (80mb) are so small, and I really wonder why not more on device searches use something like it.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 30.2 ms ] threadIf you need raw compute, I totally get it. Things like compiling the Linux kernel or training local models require a high level of thermal headroom, and the chassis has to dissipate heat in a manner that prevents throttling. In cases where you want the machine to act like a portable workstation, it makes sense that the form factor would need to be a little juiced up.
That said, computing is a whole lot more than just heavy development work. There are some domains that have a tightly-scoped set of inputs and require the user to interact in a very simple way. Something like responding to an email is a good example — typing "LGTM" requires a very small screen area, and it requires no physical keyboard or active cooling. checking the weather is similar: you don’t need 16 inches of screen real estate to go from wondering if it’s raining to seeing a cloud icon.
I say all this because portability is expensive. Not only is it expensive in terms of back pain — maintaining the ecosystem required to run these machines gets pretty complicated. You either end up shelling out money for specialized backpacks or fighting for outlet space at a coffee shop just to keep the thing running. In either case, you’re paying big money (and calorie) costs every time a user types remind me to eat a sandwich.
I think the future will be full of much smaller devices. Some hardware to build these already exists, and you can even fit them in your pocket. This mode of deployment is inspiring to me, and I’m optimistic about a future where 6.1 inches is all you need.
My opinion on this changed drastically when I started interacting with people outside of tech and not my own age. A device you struggle to see is miserable.
A Pi has 4 cores and 16GB of memory these days, so, running Qwen3 4B on a pi is pretty comfortable: https://leebutterman.com/2025/11/01/prompt-optimization-on-a...
2023: My model is too big
This was the very recent past! Up until we got LLM-crazy in 2021, this was the primary thing that deep learning papers produced: New models meant to solve very specific tasks.
I really think using small models for a lot of smell tasks is the best way forward but it's not easy to orchestrate.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL