Latency is the remaining hurdle for local AI. We'll get there, but my prediction is that it will take around 10 years.
But because prefill is parallelizable, datacenters will have an edge here for a while. For your one request, a datacenter may push 1.7kW power to a single machine to give you a result in a few seconds. The rest of the time machine will stay busy with other people’s traffic so it’s not a problem. For you, unless you’re a billionaire, you won’t have 1.7kW of processing power running idle 99.9% of time.
In 1-3 years we’ll have datacenters switch to dedicated chips that are way more energy efficient, and such chips will ultimately trickle down to PCs.
BTW - Apple is already introducing LLM specific architecture. They introduced Neural Accelerator (nit to be confused with Engine) that speeds up their GPUs 4x for LLM specific tasks. M5Ultra gets 100 tflops vs nvidia Rtx6000 getting 500tflops. „Just” 5x faster, but it’s beginning to look relevant.
Still 25 slower than a server farm B200. And when you ask Chat/Claude you get the full speed of B200.
What I’m waiting for is consumer dedicated LLM boards, a similar way we had soundcards and first gen 3d accels. No GPU, no 3D, purely LLM compute. I can see that happen in 2-3 years.