LocalLLaMA

The bubble continuing ensures the current paradigm soldiers on, meaning hideously expensive projects shove local models into people's hands for free, because everyone else is doing that.

And once it bursts, there's gonna be an insulating layer of dipshits repeating "guess it was nothing!" over the next decade of incremental wizardry. For now, tolerating the techbro cult's grand promises of obvious bullshit means the unwashed masses are interpersonally receptive to cool things happening.

Already the big boys are pivoted toward efficiency instead of raw speed at all costs. The closer they get toward a toaster matching current tech with a model trained for five bucks, the better. I'd love for VCs to burn money on experimentation instead of scale.

Sure. I'm all for the usual system design strategy with strong cohesion within one component and loose coupling on the outside to interconnect all of that. Every single household appliance should be perfectly functional on its own. Without any hubs or other stuff needed.

For self-contained products or ones without elaborate features, I kind of hate these external dependencies. I don't want to miss my NAS and how I can access my files from my phone, computer or TV. But other than that I think the TV and all other electronics should work without being connected to other things.

I mean edge computing is mainly to save cost and power. It doesn't make sense to fit each of the devices with a high end computer and maybe half a graphics card to all do AI inference. That's expensive and you can't have battery-powered devices that way. If they need internet anyway (and that's the important requirement) just buy one GPU and let them all use that. They'll fail without the network connection anyway, so it doesn't matter, and this is easier to maintain and upgrade, probably faster and cheaper.

A bit like me buying one NAS instead of one 10TB harddisk for the laptop, one for the phone, one for the TV... And then I can't listen to the song on the stereo because it was sent to my phone.

But my premise is that the voice stuff and AI features are optional. If they're essential, my suggestion wouldn't really work. I rarely see the need. I mean in your example the smoke alarm could trigger and Home Assistant would send me a push notification on the phone. I'd whip it out and have an entire screen with status information and buttons to deal with the situation. I think that'd be superior to talking to the washing machine. I don't have a good solution for the timer. One day my phone will do that as well. But mind your solution also needs the devices to communicate via one protocol and be connected. The washing machine would need to get informed by the kitchen, be clever enough to know what to do about it, also need to tell the dryer next to it to shut up... So we'd need to design a smart home system. If the devices all connect to a coordinator, perfect. That could be the edge computing "edge". If not it'd be some sort of decentral system. And I'm not aware of any in existence. It'd be challenging to design and implement. And they tend to be problematic with innovation because everything needs to stay compatible, pretty much indefinitely. It'd be nice, though. And I can see some benefits if arbitrary things just connect, or stay seperate and there's not an entire buying into some ecosystem involved.