Intelligence per Watt: Measuring Intelligence Efficiency of Local AI
The paper argues that local AI should be judged by accuracy per watt, not capability alone.
The authors test 20-plus local language models across eight accelerators on 1 million real-world single-turn chat and reasoning queries. They report that local models successfully answer 88.7% of those queries, with results varying by domain. From 2023 to 2025, their “intelligence per watt” measure improved 5.3x, while locally serviceable query coverage rose from 23.2% to 71.3%. They also find local accelerators still trail cloud accelerators on the same models, leaving room for hardware optimization. HN · ArXiv's note
The authors test 20-plus local language models across eight accelerators on 1 million real-world single-turn chat and reasoning queries. They report that local models successfully answer 88.7% of those queries, with results varying by domain. From 2023 to 2025, their “intelligence per watt” measure improved 5.3x, while locally serviceable query coverage rose from 23.2% to 71.3%. They also find local accelerators still trail cloud accelerators on the same models, leaving room for hardware optimization. HN · ArXiv's note
score 5
Discussions
- hn · 81 points · 14 comments
- hn · 88 points · 17 comments
- hn · 95 points · 20 comments
- hn · 103 points · 22 comments
- hn · 112 points · 32 comments
- hn · 119 points · 38 comments
- hn · 124 points · 41 comments
- hn · 129 points · 44 comments
- hn · 137 points · 46 comments
- hn · 141 points · 49 comments
- hn · 144 points · 51 comments
- hn · 146 points · 52 comments
- hn · 148 points · 53 comments
- hn · 153 points · 53 comments
- hn · 155 points · 53 comments
- hn · 156 points · 54 comments
- hn · 157 points · 54 comments
- hn · 157 points · 54 comments
- hn · 158 points · 54 comments
- hn · 159 points · 56 comments
- hn · 159 points · 57 comments
- hn · 160 points · 58 comments
- hn · 160 points · 58 comments
- hn · 160 points · 59 comments
- hn · 160 points · 59 comments
- hn · 160 points · 59 comments
- hn · 161 points · 61 comments
- hn · 161 points · 61 comments
- hn · 161 points · 62 comments
- hn · 163 points · 62 comments
- hn · 164 points · 62 comments
- hn · 164 points · 62 comments
- hn · 165 points · 62 comments
- hn · 165 points · 62 comments
- hn · 165 points · 63 comments
- hn · 165 points · 63 comments
- hn · 165 points · 63 comments
- hn · 166 points · 64 comments
- hn · 166 points · 65 comments
- hn · 166 points · 65 comments
- hn · 166 points · 65 comments