Trend Tuesday: Could AI Catch a Fly?

Trend Tuesday: Could AI Catch a Fly? 🦟💨

A fly zips through the air with just 150,000 neurons, consuming only microwatts of energy. It stabilizes mid-flight, dodges obstacles, and reacts faster than you can swat. Meanwhile, large AI models require vast computational resources, scaling energy consumption with every generated token.

Are we building intelligence the wrong way?

I remember the first time I discovered SQLite—a tiny, self-contained database that runs in under 1MB. It wasn’t just small; it was powerful. It made me question why so much software is bloated. More is not always better.

The same principle applies to AI. DeepSeek’s Mixture of Experts is already proving that activating only the necessary parameters saves energy without sacrificing performance—much like how (biological) neurons fire in bursts rather than all at once.

🔹 Tiny but Mighty: Efficiency Wins

Smarter design has outperformed brute force before:
✅ Micro-Max – A chess engine with 2000 ELO in just 1,337 bytes.
✅ smollm – A pip-installable tiny LLM that gets the job done.
✅ LZ4 Compression – Super-fast, super-lightweight.
Also musicians know: Minimalism isn’t weakness—it’s mastery.

🔹 AI’s Future: Smarter, Not Bigger

Scaling up has worked, but we’re already hitting energy constraints. The future belongs to models that achieve more with less. We don’t need ever-larger models; we need more efficient architectures:

⚡ Sparse, modular AI that activates only what’s needed.
🧠 Neural architectures inspired by biological brains.
🛠️ Specialized hardware optimized for efficiency (like the experimental neuromorphic chips).

Of course, AI and a fly's brain serve different purposes, but nature proves intelligence doesn’t require massive energy consumption. Instead of chasing scale, let’s chase elegance.

The AI race will soon shift from "who’s bigger?" to "who’s smarter?"

💡 Where else do you see efficiency making the difference?

- The fly brain has been mapped, btw, see Nature volume 634, pages 139–152 (2024) https://lnkd.in/egmpVcxt
- I met R. D. Hipp of sqlite at the Tcl conference 2008 in Vancouver, https://lnkd.in/ebDr2YXD

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