set up a mini rack for a home lab setup (will share a pic soon) w my Mac mini and DGX spark with more coming. had a few thoughts as I play w qwen3.5, gemma4, and other models:
- there’s an S curve on LLM model quality per use case. Show text output side by side from the latest and you can’t tell the difference. I assume we’ll get to a flattish part of the curve on coding, multimodal, and other use cases over time
- you seem to be able to swap the model underneath a great UX and the whole thing is portable. Openclaw workflows and personality are a bunch of markdown files and can run equally on GPT or Opus
- SOTA models can be distilled and only stay in front of open weight models by ~12-18 months. Have to keep innovating to stay ahead (and god bless this dynamic from the startup ecosystem’s POV)
- local AI models getting very good particularly on the latest Apple hardware. Very usable for many use cases and will only get better