Running a 180B parameter LLM on a single Apple M2 Ultra

Historically average RAM has grown far faster than linear, and there really hasn't been anything pressing manufacturers to push the envelope here in the past few years... until now.

It could be that LLM model sizes keep increasing such that we continue to require cloud consumption, but I suspect the sizes will not increase as quickly as hardware for inference.

Given how useful GPT-4 is already. Maybe one more iteration would unlock the vast majority of practical use cases.

I think people will be surprised that consumers ultimately end up benefitting far more from LLMs than the providers. There's not going to be much moat or differentiation to defend margins... more of a race to the bottom on pricing

Unless I'm misunderstanding, doesn't OpenAI have a very vested interest to keep making their products so good/so complex/so large that consumer hobbyists can't just `git clone` an alternative that's 95% as good running locally?

From what I understand, if you take the absolute best cutting edge LLM with the most parameters and the most up to date model from GitHub/HuggingFace/whatever, it's very far off from the output you get from GPT-3.5 / GPT-4

aka full of hallucinations, not very useful

I don't know if this is the right way to look at it but if what George Hotz said about GPT-4 simply being "8 220B parameter models glued together by something called a mixture-of-experts", from what I understand, OpenAI's moat is:

their access/subsidiized cost to GPUs/infrastructure with Microsoft

the 8 220B models they have are really good/I don't think anything open source matches them/nobody can download "all of Reddit/Twitter/Wikipedia/StackOverflow/whatever else they trained on" anymore like they could given how everybody wants to protect/monetize their content now

and then the "router" / "MoE" piece seems to be something missing from open source offerings as well