A moment of history comes to mind. The moment serious compute moved onto an office desk in a way usefull enough to pay the very serious price for the hardware. Till then they had been a very expensive and exciting hobby for tech heads. Huge corporate mainframes and timeshare access were the only real game in town.
Visicalc. Business or planning data laid out on your new screen, recalculating numbers live as you shifted assumtions. All in the form completely familiar, a standard tool on paper. But on paper they were hard work for planning or testing ideas. Way too many hours of calculating for the workflow that the completely new device on your desk allowed.
It may be that DeepSeek's most radical contribution is the power of local LLMs. That changes everything. In a way that is rather parallel to the Visicalc moment. A not expensive SBC or the Mate 50 can run a decent LLM already, as the core interface and orchestration of the s]stem. That is just the start. What can be done with that is just emerging, like what could be done with a spreadsheet once it was no longer graphite put onto paper manually. Mainframes and timeshare did not go away, and timeshare returned as cloud. Local compute shifted the user base and the economics.
A moment of history comes to mind. The moment serious compute moved onto an office desk in a way usefull enough to pay the very serious price for the hardware. Till then they had been a very expensive and exciting hobby for tech heads. Huge corporate mainframes and timeshare access were the only real game in town.
Visicalc. Business or planning data laid out on your new screen, recalculating numbers live as you shifted assumtions. All in the form completely familiar, a standard tool on paper. But on paper they were hard work for planning or testing ideas. Way too many hours of calculating for the workflow that the completely new device on your desk allowed.
It may be that DeepSeek's most radical contribution is the power of local LLMs. That changes everything. In a way that is rather parallel to the Visicalc moment. A not expensive SBC or the Mate 50 can run a decent LLM already, as the core interface and orchestration of the s]stem. That is just the start. What can be done with that is just emerging, like what could be done with a spreadsheet once it was no longer graphite put onto paper manually. Mainframes and timeshare did not go away, and timeshare returned as cloud. Local compute shifted the user base and the economics.