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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Those people won't be buying the Spark laptop, but asking "why anyone would want to do inference on a laptop" is broader than what the article covers.

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Local AI is an expensive hobby. You're paying big money for small performance (so mainly for the feeling of "owning it", which is a great motivator). It can't match cloud services, not absolutely nor bang-for-buck, especially if you look a bit for cheaper and freebie options. As someone who loves and promotes local AI, in the situation you described my plea would be to use that money to improve your situation more directly (move out, get support,...). The cost of a laptop that can run somewhat decent models should buy you at least several months of therapy (@1 session/week).

You can't put a price of sending all your IP to a dubious third-party. Sorry. You argument apples vs oranges.

If you want local AI, which I absolutely encourage you to, I agree with the OP. Get a (mini)-PC and set up a VPN. It's going to save you money compared to a laptop, short- (usually cheaper) and long-term (usually better upgradeability). You'll have more money for therapy, which I would also encourage you to consider if you come from a broken home, as the GP mentioned.

Sure, they pay you well at Anthropic or another OpenAI to go and ridicule people? Not everyone builds some irrelevant SaaS where everything is for sale. Some of us work with other people's data and treat it seriously.

Maybe you need a therapy. FOMO can be treated, too. Or you're just upset about Trump falling into irrelevance.

Maybe you're responding to the wrong thread. The discussion was about laptop vs PC for local AI, which should be pretty equivalent from the perspective of Anthropic, in the context of a broken home. Read the previous chain and calm down.

Thanks, sometimes it's good to hear: stop. I'll think about the therapy.

The situation we are talking about here is someone with no fixed home or insecure housing. That kind of person likely isn’t even paying for cloud AI, let alone buying massively overpriced hardware to run it locally.

The market for someone who wants local AI in a laptop for $10k has to be tiny.

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