Right now the models are doubling in performance (by the METR time horizon metric at least) every 4 months, so 3 doublings in a year; conversely, I hear (not my field) it takes around a year to make a prototype IC and another year to turn that into mass production, i.e. if the next (late-2026 model) iPhone has a chip like this, it will likely be with, at best, a late-2024 set of weights. I think you can get open-weights models today that have performance equivalent to the SOTA-late-2024 while fitting in the RAM of a (high end) 2025-26 phone.
At some point the music will stop on training bigger models, and when that happens it will make sense to have ROM weights (or 100% analog circuits given how noise-resistant LLMs are), but we'll know when that is because the investment bubble funding the training of new models will have burst.
wait, analog circuits? can you elaborate this?
Transistors can be used to amplify signals, they are not limited to acting as binary switches. If you use analog rather than digital, using transistors in this way means you can replace however many transistors it would have taken for multiplying two n-bit numbers with just one; I understand capacitors can be used for accumulation, but don't know how many additional components that needs as I'm an electronics noob.
The reason we don't do this in general (any more) is that for long chains between input and output it has been much too difficult to avoid accumulation of errors. LLMs happen to be extremely resilient to errors like this, which is also why we can use e.g. 4-bit weights.
Circuits that aren't restricted to two particular voltage levels.
At some point it’s got to be good enough for the normal “phone stuff” that appeal to most users. So they wouldn’t suffer from FOMO because they didn’t wait for the next model. Every phone gimmick went through the same evolution curve until it passed the “good enough” point and eventually plateaued.
Yes, but irrelevant. While these models are improving at the present rate, the manufacturer can save money at no loss of feature-bullet-point-on-website by letting you download a model after you bought the thing and running it on normal hardware.
The rate of change to the models has to be slower than the hardware roll-out to be worth a hardware solution. If "good enough" happens before then, that just means the user gets a software solution.
You might be right but hard to tell without analyzing costs and benefits. Is a cutting edge model for phone stuff worth the slower performance and battery drain for example?
The rate of change by itself doesn’t tell you the whole story because of costs and diminishing returns. So what if your model is twice as good if it’s 10x the cost and it saves you 1ms? Everything else about phones reached “good enough for a phone” levels in years, and then got minimal generational improvements.