@adlrocha - Forget “Fat” Models. The Future is Narrow

A quick confession before we start. I told you across the last two posts that I was working towards building my own local inference rig, and I’ve decided to hold off on the hardware for now. After my analysis, it was clear that the market is moving too fast to freeze a build, we may be at an all-time-high of hardware prices, and I’d rather keep my money in my pocket a bit longer. But I haven’t dropped the thread (I can be pretty obsessive). I’m still deep in the design space, still trying to work out what the right box actually looks like before I spend a penny on it.And then this week a piece of news dragged me right back in. China’s Ministry of Commerce has reportedly spent the past month in meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai about restricting overseas access to their best AI models. And not only the closed ones. The report says it covers open-weight models too, the freely downloadable kind, with Qwen and GLM-5.2 named directly. The idea being floated is a tiered system:…