1. Very likely a small model. You can certainly pretrain, but I would grab an existing base model, say Qwen 3 class
2. The new RL method is a breakthrough, classification doesn't need to align with human preferences
3. The new output is an overstatement. It's just a new LM head. Of course autoregressive decoding can be used for classification: it takes just a few tokens to express the output. Think twice: are you sure classification doesn't need few-shot, CoT, or reasoning? All of these depend on auto-regressiveness
4. It carves out a market already existing, which is now served by oversized LLMs (hence overpaid), e.g. LLM as judge, labeling
5. Jevons effect will kick in, promoting more modeling efforts for small budget teams. It might even accelerate RSI
My take on device-side inference: it's all about high bandwidth memory (thinking about it, this holds for the cloud too).
MacBooks enjoy incidental capacity of apple silicon, but per-device RAM is too low (16 to 24GB), only sufficient for a decent SLM. 512GB is the highest you can go (Kimi K2*). Counting MLX downloads of Kimi K2* on Huggingface, I estimate the user base to be <25K.
On the other hand, the newly debuted DGX station (Nvidia) has 748GB, which can fit in the latest Kimi, DS, and Qwen. Also the quantization options of CUDA is way better than MLX.
For high-end inferencing, I place my bet on workstations over Macs.
Back of the envelope calculation: Ox Alpha has been out for a week with 130K users and 7T tokens burned.
Method 1: Assuming Ox Alpha is the GLM 5.3 class, it has roughly the same active param count as DeepSeek V4 Pro (~40B vs 49B), derive the cost by the floor price DS has ever published.
Method 2: Assuming the users are concentrated within an 8-hour working window each day, derive number of H800 nodes needed (~700 nodes at $2/GPU-hour).
In both methods, I assume 90/10 IO split and 60% cache hit. Both methods come to $2M.
I think the ROI is awesome: (1) publicity and (2) data harvesting.
Lots of attentions are now on GPU residual value. I find car analogy to be useful.
* Both new and used cars can do the same job (you can run the latest model on 6-year-old A100) * New cars are more efficient (higher performance per power draw) * It's not the year, but mileage and maintenance
The last point is undeveloped. We need Carfax and KBB for GPUs.
Looking forward to the Qwen 3.8 model drop, and congratulations on joining the trillion parameters club.
But my eyes are on the promised 27B model. Small (<50B) models decline on OpenRouter, because they are being run on local devices. If people see the family trees here on HF they will understand.