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Comment on I Reverse-Engineered the TiinyAI Pocket Lab from Marketing Photos

Great research and write-up, maybe a bit too elaborate.

Will be interesting to see if a public outcry will happen once these boxes start arriving at those who funded the kickstarter.

buildbot 5mo

It’s LLM slop and very shallow, in my opinion.

shotnothing 5mo

whats shallow about the research? it all seems to check out?

Karuma 5mo

Thank you.

Every time I complain about this kind of useless AI slop I get downvoted to hell and get dozens of comments saying "it doesn't look AI at all", so I don't even bother anymore. It's incredibly sad, I expected much more from this community... But it looks like it'll soon be dead like the rest of the internet.

qwe----3 5mo

The blogpost?

pushfoo 5mo

ctrl-f for "This isn't" and note how many instances of this pattern there are:

This isn't X. It's Y.

rkagerer 5mo

I don't see a single occurrence in the article of the word "isn't".

sodality2 5mo

That means the lock-in isn’t just product strategy. It’s also architecture.

And that omission isn’t some harmless simplification. It’s the entire trick.

It isn't just once. It's—twice. ;)

kgeist 5mo

Also stuff like this:

That’s not exotic. That’s just model parallelism with extra suffering.

That’s not product magic. That’s a checkbox.

What really triggers my internal AI slop detector is this:

Their renders. Their prototype shots. Their exploded views. Their spec sheet.

Nobody asked what silicon was inside. Nobody asked how 120B on LPDDR5X was supposed to work. Nobody spent

No cloud. No GPU. No subscriptions.

wrong class of chip, wrong power envelope, wrong everything

The visual geometry matches. The licensing model matches. The China-based semiconductor ecosystem match

Real researchers. Real papers. Real contributions.

LLMs love to overuse this pattern.

kgeist 5mo

This also smells of an autoregressive model trying to make a point that TiinyAI simply forked another repo and claimed as their own invention, before realizing mid-paragraph it's by the same people:

So no, TiinyAI did not “launch” PowerInfer. SJTU researchers did.

TiinyAI’s GitHub repo is a fork of the original PowerInfer repository. At least one of the original academic authors appears tied to the code history. So there is clearly some real overlap between the research world and the product world.

rkagerer 5mo

Oof, thanks! (I'm going to blame it on my Android Chrome "find in page" tool not working as expected, and I apologize)

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