Watch Out! AI is coming for your Laptops

It’s been one of the toughest times of my life. I lost my mum a few weeks ago quite suddenly and my world as I knew it crashed. I experienced emotions I never thought I had, and reacted in ways that surprised even me. I got to understand the true meaning of having a mum, and the vacuum they leave when they’re gone. 

Emotions and learnings the most advanced AI model will never have. So anytime you’re worried AI will replace you, or your job, or your partner etc., remember what you’ve got that AI can never ever have. Emotions! Emotions and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) amongst others. 

I’m slowly coming out of the mirk, and ready to wrap my head around the never-ending AI events / news.

Although to be fair, we haven’t had the dramatic humpty-dumpty-rollercoaster-eye-rolling events we had in Q2 over the past few weeks, and thank goodness for that because we all needed a breather. 

So while you all are taking a much needed break from the dramatic AI revolution, I won’t hold my breath for too long but rather hold on to my laptop! 

Because the tech companies aren’t letting up in their never-ending push to have AI on every form of technology, including your laptops! Yes, I know you already use Claude Code on your laptops, Gemini, ChatGPT, (who still uses that btw?) Perplexity, yada yada… you get my drift. But this is different, because what Meta, Alibaba, and Open AI are planning, is to have you use open-source models on edge AI or cloud and run small datacentres on your laptops (basically).

I recently spoke on the BBC World Service: World Business Report show about the latest AI top model launched by China’s Alibaba, a direct competitor to Meta’s recently launched open-source model: Muse Glimmer. Both models are available to download on your computers. 

Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8-27B model is a new open-weight AI model built to run on consumer hardware such as laptops. It contains 27 billion parameters, which means lots and lots of compute and is built for coding, work, research and agentic tasks. 

The juicy bit is that the weights of Alibaba’s most capable model Qwen 3.8 Max which has 2.4 trillion parameters is available for free. If you’re wondering what the catch is, you’re not alone. But it’s clear the competition between China and the US must be driving these freebies!

Of course, unsurprisingly, Qwen had 2.6 more downloads than Meta’s Muse Glimmer within the first week it launched.

While all these latest freebies and mind-blowing parameter models would sweep your typical AI nerd and techie off their feet, what happens to the rest of us? The rest of the world who have no clue how to download an open-source free model on their laptop, and what to do with it if done. 

I mean, Claude Code turned so many people into techie wanna-bes, people who had to forcefully learn about terminal commands to navigate installing and using Claude Code. 

So are we slowly being forced to become techies like the rest of the tech world? But what if we don’t want that? As the popular saying goes, “variety is the spice of life” and the world will be in shambles if everyone becomes a techie, forgetting all the other valuable and important fields. Go on, try to name at least 7 of these! 

So unfortunately as the industry keeps inching closer towards open-weight models, and the more advanced AI models become, millions of more people will be left behind. These same people who have tried their darndest to become AI literate (or those who bothered to!), adopt AI solutions, keep their employers happy and so on.

We’re now entering a different phase of AI adoption. A phase where every penny counts, the blindfolds are slowly unfolding, and questions on affordability and ROI are top of mind for most executives. Hence the race to cheaper Chinese AI models. But to stress my point, new advancements like these will only increase the AI divide, where only a small fraction of people will benefit from the most advanced and capable, cheap AI models.

But again that’s up for debate. Because while some may think heavy AI usage is a benefit, others may see it as a loss. Mainly because if you aren’t using the most advanced capable, speedy, intelligent, super AI model you might not be missing out on much. Although this mainly depends on your day-to-day job and role.

I’ll end off on this note. AI advancements keep happening everyday. The pressure and competition from the world’s super powers also apply to you. So whatever you do, ensure you’re on top of your AI game, learn what’s relevant for you, your job and needs; and basically make the most of what’s available to you without emptying your pockets. You don’t have to adopt or learn every new AI model or device. Learn what you need to. 

Stay curious. Stay optimistic. Keep learning.