Any kids coming from a school-issue Chromebook could get a great upgrade moving to these.
I know people who run Illustrator/Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Logic, Microsoft Office, and Font Design software on their 8GB Macbooks. Obviously, not all at the same time, but at least 2 or 3 apps together without a problem.
This gives an on-ramp to those users looking for a new, shiny entry-level laptop.
Part of disaster-planning is to figure out the blast radius. If it's just your house, or a small brownout, then something like this would work. As long as you plug your router so wifi can keep running, or maybe you can tether to a cell.
If it's a neighborhood-wide outage, chances are internet is down and possibly nearby cell towers. Most of them are suposed to have battery backup.
We once had a six day outage and it turned out the cell towers ran out of power after a few hours. Phone companies brought in diesel generators just to keep emergency phone lines open (with degraded data). All the food in the fridges had to be thrown out after day 3.
It was right after that when a lot of people went and bought gas-powered generators as home backups. Many signed up for satellite data. Those who could afford it got solar panels and home-size batteries.
There was a cheapo Japanese restaurant downtown. Plastic everything. Went there for lunch a while back. Worst Bento box ever.
Six months later. Hmm, Bento box sounds good. Go to this Japanese restaurant. Halfway through the awful meal, remember I'd been there! Swore never to go back. Again.
This cycle repeated SIX times.
What broke it was the whole building burning to the ground because of a grease fire.
When this automation fad showed up, many people pointed out that there would be plenty of cases where the training data just didn't cover edge-cases. Problem is, life is FULL of edge-cases. This is where humans are uniquely good at improvising and adapting in real-time, when faced with previously unknown situations.
In fact, you can argue humans are really, really good at handling exceptions to the rule. Pretty much the textbook definition of "creativity."
In the dotcom era, the push was to create lots of free services. Once you had enough users, you wanted to see how many would be willing to pay for it. There was a formula that justified getting more investment (it varied by domain). Back then, almost nobody other than Amazon survived the hard shaking of the tree.
We may be coming up to the point where customer acquisition through free service ends. Whatsever is left standing will move to the next round.
If art generated by AI can not be copyrighted, it may well extend to AI-generated code. If so, the implications could be pretty far-reaching.
The one, practical use-case of AI that has found 'product market fit' so far has been using AI for coding. Companies are encouraging it. Developers (including experienced ones) are starting to use more of it. But if it turns out none of the generated output can be copyrighted, then you lose all the commercial users who are the revenue sources for all these tools and companies.
This talk feels like it's touching on a pretty important topic.
At this point, these small models should add explicit minimum hardware requirements just so they can stand out. STM32 w xxGB of PSRAM. Android phone w this much RAM, how many TOPS, and minimum OS version. ESP32-S3 or S4? That sort of thing.
If you just say 'small,' you get lost in the noise.