same thing with smol local LLMs versus the big ones in the sky. your smol local LLM will only be able to tackle projects which are not comercially valuable anymore, because people expect 100x scope and features. which is fine as a hobby/art project
yes, we'll do amazing things with local LLMs in 2 years, but the big LLMs will do things beyond imagination (assembly vs C)
I think we are going to see a surge in software claiming to do everything and becoming bloated and unsustainable.
I already see 1gpu local models 1 shotting games via vibe coding. I see people doing agentic programming, granted more slowly and cheaply than 12 Claude sessions.
The difference isn't as big as it was 2 months ago. In the past 45 days so many model releases have happened. Meanwhile frontier performance has stagnated and degraded. If it's a taste of what is to come I welcome it.
If that sounds complicated, that’s because it is! It’s a tricky balance to get right. I think the current architecture for most GPT models isn’t sufficient to solve this problem for good. I suppose we need to do more research into what constitutes desirable vs undesirable hallucination and how to shift the balance towards the latter.
Deepseek is doing valuations right now.
Moonshot is just getting started. Same with AMD. mistral is still working hard at it and has a customer base.
An Egyptian company dropped their first small model this month, Horus.
There are enough geopolitics at play that I expect this to be a very different outcome from typical startup market dynamics. If anything j worry about the big us labs longevity. The world is fed up with US tech it seems, and even for us citizens it's questionable the frontier labs have their interests in mind as they risk the entire economy.
OpenAI has provided in the past a couple of open-weights models, but it does not seem to plan the release of any others.
But except for OpenAI and Anthropic, with this announcement Zyphra is the 12th company which has announced new improved open-weights models during the last couple of months.
A half of these 12 companies have launched not only small models with less than 128B parameters, but also big models with a number of parameters ranging from over 200B to over 1T.
So for now there is a healthy competition and the offerings in open-weights models are very diverse and numerous.
(The 12 directories on huggingface.co: deepseek-ai, google, ibm-granite, LiquidAI, MiniMaxAI, mistralai, moonshotai, nvidia, Qwen, XiaomiMiMo, zai-org, Zyphra.)