Small AI Models Gain Traction In places with unreliable networks

(spectrum.ieee.org)

28 points | by sscaryterry 3 hours ago ago

6 comments

  • tim-fan an hour ago

    Is anyone making LLM-in-a-box for emergency supply kits yet?

    I feel that would be handy in all sorts of situations when networks are down.

    • SwellJoe 7 minutes ago

      This is couched in prepper nonsense, but it's got LLM, WikiPedia, maps, etc. A bunch of genuinely useful stuff to keep on a USB stick or whatever: https://www.projectnomad.us/

      But, the current model you really want for an emergency kit is Gemma 4 12B QAT 4-bit. At ~7GB on disk, it's small enough to run on a tablet or any modern computer, slowly if you don't have a GPU or modern Apply silicon, but exceedingly smart for its size, excellent vision capabilities, good tool user, surprisingly good reasoning.

    • cdnsteve 27 minutes ago

      Can you expand what you mean?

      • wahnfrieden 17 minutes ago

        They want to ask the iOS Foundation model (frontier on device intelligence for something small) for instance about emergency procedures and life-saving info. I wouldn’t trust that model with much at all though. More likely to find what you need from miniature survival guides.

  • bombcar an hour ago

    99% of the model "work" (meaning the connection to your computer) is just spinning a spinner - something that makes me want to wrap it with a mosh shell so I can just keep moving from network to network.

  • enoint an hour ago

    Fascinating to wonder whether the bigger model finds fewer or more counterfeits than the on-device one.