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My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

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447 points hemant6488 | 2 comments | 18 Jun 25 15:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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joshstrange ◴[18 Jun 25 20:09 UTC] No.44312927[source]▶
I wonder if someone will make a LLM farm from older (probably not too old) iPhones using Apple's new foundation models. I know they won't hold a candle to SOTA models, they are much smaller for one, but when they announced API access that's the first thing I thought of, a sort of "folding @ home" but routing queries to a phone and spitting back the results.

It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.

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1. romain_batlle ◴[18 Jun 25 20:25 UTC] No.44313019[source]▶
nop probably a very bad idea even if you had enough iPhones and you could parallelise them, it would be 10x less electricity efficient
replies(1): >>44320905 #
2. lucb1e ◴[19 Jun 25 17:49 UTC] No.44320905[source]▶
Manufacturing newer CPUs makes sense only if the device it's meant to replace is like 25 years old:

"The emissions from production of computing devices far exceed the emissions from operating them" [...] "the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential [...]. For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years" https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...