The AI boom is built on the idea that bigger is better. A recent study suggests the opposite may soon be true: small language models running on desktop computers may be able to handle most of the tasks currently performed by large language models.
If that's true, Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX's xAI may have reason to worry. The future of AI could be smaller, cheaper and far less profitable than investors expect. On June 1, Nvidia made headlines when it revealed a new desktop AI platform that runs on Windows PCs, raising the possibility that the future of AI might not just be in giant data centres. A Stanford University study published two weeks earlier suggested the same. It compared small local language models (SLMs) running on desktop PCs with large language models (LLMs) running in data centres.
