Practical AI · Thursday, August 6, 2026
Chris Benson explains that AI models come in various sizes, with 'frontier models' being the largest and most sophisticated but requiring expensive hardware. Smaller models, like Gemma, can be downloaded and run locally on available hardware, with China emerging as a significant source for open models.
“And and another thing to throw in there because it's relevant to the rest of the conversation is that these models can be of many different sizes.”
“What we call frontier models, which are the the largest, most complicated and produce the most sophisticated output, uh, often require hardware that is going to be prohibitively expensive.”
“You can, you know, you mentioned Gemma, uh, which is, uh, some of the smaller, gradually smaller models, uh, that can be downloaded and run locally with whatever hardware you have available, uh, if they're open.”
“You're probably most likely going to a Chinese model these days. Uh, or, uh, if you're willing to do APIs for closed models, uh, the American based ones, uh, are still leading in that space.”