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Comment by gopalv | Hacker News Reader

> Does anyone think we need a Mythos level model to plan a road trip, or give someone tips on making a cake recipe?

This is starting to look at a lot like Intel vs Arm from the last era.

The Fable & Mythos are starting to look like a giant Xeon, while the smaller lighter models are starting to look like a lot of tiny ARM chips which sip on power instead.

The risk is the same as what Intel had. There is a group who are pushing them to go bigger and with a resource no limit approach, who have a lot of dollars to push you that way.

Follow them and they lead you to a pile of money, but then you risk something like Apple Silicon happening.

Something which got better because of efficiency & continuous improvement, not neutered due to it.

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> The risk is the same as what Intel had. There is a group who are pushing them to go bigger and with a resource no limit approach, who have a lot of dollars to push you that way. Follow them and they lead you to a pile of money, but then you risk something like Apple Silicon happening.

The problem was that Intel stopped making things faster and better, and shifted to wearables and mobile chips instead of investing in their hard-tech strategy that had worked for decades.

Except aren’t these Chinese models having to go big too? While they might not be Mythos/Fable sized, a trillion plus parameters is hardly a local server or even desktop to mainframe style jump

I've had 2b models give a plausible Paris vacation itinerary. A tools-capable 12b and especially 30b model from 2026 is certainly capable of producing passable results. I was demonstrating the qwen 3.6 27b model I stood up last week to my wife and it gave her a passable Moroccan Chicken recipe. With tool calling (search) they're quite good.

It’s AI talking about AI so cum grano salis, but my AI is saying I would need at least a half million dollar in hardware to run the newer high quality Chinese models with bemchmark-competitive force.

You can run a Moroccan chicken fragment on the cheap in homage to what you cannot run

With OpenAI having released 20 and 120B models a while back, I think they recognized that tiny models were never going to be a defensible income stream.

Any value will come from the largest models, and those largest models are unlikely to ever run on consumer hardware within their window of relevancy.

You're missing the point. You very rarely need the biggest and "best" model. This is psychology and nothing more, people always want the "best" and don't often consider "good enough".

Small models are good enough depending on your task. That's the point. A model you can run on your phone or laptop is an incredibly useful tool for a lot of problems even though it isn't the "best" theoretically possible model.

Yep.

And firms will be kept in check with financials.

If your competitor starts using chinese models and delivers better earnings whilst you are spending more on american ones... hahaaha. Wait and see what happens.

You will be FIRED!

You're missing the point: those small "good enough" models aren't monetizable and haven't been for months already. All of the value in LLMs is going to come from frontier models at a high cost to businesses/governments. It'll be the difference between next day air-mail of a contract and sticking a stamp on your christmas card to Grandma - nobody's making a profit on the christmas card.

I suspect in 5 years everyone will have the equivalent of a 512gb mac mini running a 500b class open weight model for 98% of their tasks, shelling out to openai/anthropic for the other 2%. People who need higher end models will own the equivalent of 4 x 512gb mac mini running a 2.8T class open weight model. I don't know where OpenAI and Anthropic are going to get their revenue from to keep developing SOTA frontier models at that point.

How often do you need the task to turn out harder than you anticipate and the small model unexpectedly failing to change the calculation?

I was on a long international flight recently with no internet and Google AI Edge Gallery installed on my phone with a 2.5GB quantized version of Gemma 4 on it. I was able to chat to it for a while and get some information about my destination which all turned out to be true and good advice.

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