The Taalas chips are not physically small. And part of their secret (if you look at the design) is just locating a bunch of memory soldered on the edges ( I belive higher amounts of SRAM ? )

I don't think this works out from a cost/silicon perspective. Small models already run pretty well in software (since the weights fit in cache) and big models require silicon area proportional to the size of weights. On a mobile device putting a chip like this is competing directly in BOM and power against a whole lot more l3 cache, and the l3 cache makes everything faster

That's actually a really good point... There's currently zero incentive to buying more hardware, and that's one very good reason do have a new one.

From what I remember, these chips are not mobile size yet

Apple is somewhere between fashion company and second rate tech company.

They could have 9 year old AI and still post profits.

Not sure if it's my pixel or android, but I made a randos jaw drop with what the crappy AI on android can do.

When are we getting android OpenClaw?

If you’re only running models for frontier capabilities, yeah. For tasks where current models are smart enough, running them 100x faster is the most impactful improvement you can make. Consider all the things you could use a model for, but don’t, because the latency is just a bit too high.

I'd gladly pay for a Claude Opus 4.6 Thinking High in silicon and use it for 1-2 years. It's good enough for many coding tasks.

Compute the cost of producing n of them devices, imagine a fair price based on that, and see if that local, blazing fast card* can be an asset that could be replaced periodically.

*(It's local: private files managing firm oriented. It's blazing fast: it can be placed into recursive, intensive local workflows.)

obsolescence is the whole point. apple gets to sell a new phone very 6-12 months because of it.

i have written about this:

"For device makers

Packaging models with laptops and smartphones will let application access near free, low latency inference and potentially offer users a better experience with the option of preserving data on-device. This is viable under the condition that tasks that do require larger expert models that run in the cloud can be routed to external models. A side-effect of local models and what will let Apple cut upgrade cycles from ~4 years (?) down to 12-18 months is specialized hardware to run them. For almost a decade, smartphones have been trying to compete on better cameras. This coming decade will see them selling better GPUs, NPUs, ASICs and whatever other things they'll be calling the inference chips, to drive re-purchase. Every six months will see a better model on new hardware, which will enable better performance in certain applications."

https://try.works/role-model-the-case-for-a-model-routing-pr...

"seems like baking models into silicon is speed-running obsolescence"

Now maybe. When models are flying passenger aircraft, other prerogatives will assert themselves. When a 50TB ROM means you can impulse purchase a ChatGPT 6.3 xhigh that runs on batteries, yet more use cases will be apparent.

I could see this making sense when model development start to settle down ... it's going to settle down, right? ...

Which is exactly what companies and shareholders want to increase sales.

Not sure. You can fix the transistors but leave the connections between them open for flexibility, so you only need to change the manufacturing process for the upper masks for every new model.

Look at it the other way: compared to the cost of training a model, the cost of making a custom ASIC is trivial.

Not necessarily: it is relevant to Taalas only if it is a compute-in-memory architecture.

The Jalapeño mentioned («Anthropic is not alone in walking this path») in the article is still a classical Von Neumann architecture.

And Taalas' idea makes sense in a perspective of scale - producing a large number of cards; "for internal use" (a lower order of items) means a high production cost.

Depends what you mean by relevant. If you use AI primarily as a search/knowledge engine, it makes no sense. If it's your capable assistant that has a lot of general knowledge, can do tool calls, and has a big context window, very doable.

Indeed, for some kinds of applications involving secure/legal data etc. I can see the consistency of silicon winning out, because it combines performance with immutability and guardrails in hardware. Some chips have write-once PROMs to store password hashes and similar, you could do the same thing with prompt hashing to absolutely force or forbid certain behaviors. A model that can't be updated is also a model that can't be hacked.

People already buy new phones every year, this just creates even more reason to do so

One of these chips smart enough to take orders at a drive-thru would be relevant for a decade, minimum.

OpenAI and Anthropic are both designing ASICs.

This is only true for people who are solely focused on performance. There is absolutely a market for acceptable performance combined with predictability.

Not so if it's embedded in something smart enough for its intended purpose.

Think vision, spatial reasoning, speech synthesis, even some speech analysis. Think self-driving cars (and drones) that need 10x less power for the brain, and can think at 10x situation per second.

OTOH, people get a new iPhone every year and they are ok with it.

If a model is good enough today, it's still gonna be good enough in a year. Except you'll be able to serve it 1/100 of the price. Or 100x the speed.