Prediction: in ten years your toaster will know about ancient mesopotamian history (and everything else).
Three data points convince me:
- The power brick for your laptop has more computing power than the first Mac. Strange but true. Moore’s law at work.
- Economies of scale. When I worked on toy robots at Sphero, I was stunned that our circuit boards had many features we didn’t use: wifi, FM radio, temperature sensors, and more. Why? Because it’s cheaper for the manufacturers to make one board with all the features than to bother with multiple variants.
- I can run a genuinely good LLM on my laptop today. It’s a few gigabytes. And maybe 80% as capable as Claude or ChatGPT. And it just… runs.
Conclusion? It won’t be long before any device will have a full LLM included, even if only a tiny portion of it is actually needed by the product. Toaster manufacturers might find it hard to find a board without a full LLM! It will be great to explain to my toaster in plain English how I want my toast, but it’s crazy to think that it will be equally capable of discussing mesopotamian history—or anything else that’s ever been on the Internet. (Even if they somehow block or disable this ability.)
Back-of-napkin math calculations (i.e. Claude) put us at 2030–2040 for a $5 embedded chip running a 5 GB LLM model. I’d be curious to hear from anyone with more experience in these things…but in any case, I look forward to a strange world where, to save on cost, every device contains a compressed backup of the entirety of human knowledge!
Next on earth: not only is the toaster more knowledgeable than humans, but also smarter.