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LLMs and AI on microcontrollers and tiny hardware — news, bench logs, and reference guides
5 posts
A new 'Barista' model and a closer look at Google's Per-Layer Embeddings trick show what running an LLM on a microcontroller can and can't do.
A 17MB runtime that runs LLMs on AMD's Ryzen AI NPUs — built by three academics, acquired by AMD on July 17, 2026, folded into ROCm in August. The NPU rung of the edge ladder just got real.
A $5 Pico 2 writes TinyStories. A $15 Pi Zero 2 W runs SmolLM2-135M. A $299 RISC-V board claims 30B. What AI really fits at every rung of the edge hardware ladder.
On August 5, 2026 a 180.9M-parameter mixture-of-experts LLM ran on a $6-10 ESP32-P4 — and got two Hacker News points. The undercovered microcontroller AI story of the year.
In July 2026 a 28.9-million-parameter LLM ran fully on-device on an $8 ESP32-S3 at almost 10 tokens per second. Here's how the trick works, who built it, what's hype, and what you can actually build with a microcontroller LLM today.