Shouldn't this be in userspace?

Posted Feb 13, 2026 2:39 UTC (Fri) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408)
In reply to: Shouldn't this be in userspace? by quotemstr
Parent article: An in-kernel machine-learning library

> AI inference isn't exactly known to be a lightweight or low-latency operation.

That really depends. The Opus encoder, for example, has a speech/music detection gated recurrent unit (GRU) with less than 5k weights and can detect, in real time with hysteresis and while using less than 0.02% of the CPU, whether or not any given 20 ms audio frame has transitioned from speech to music (and vice versa): https://jmvalin.ca/opus/opus-1.3/. Any time you call someone over WebRTC (and pretty much every common VoIP protocol), you'll be doing inference with this model 50 times per second without even realizing it.

And a GRU isn't just a trivial feedforward neural network; It has memory that allows it to keep some information for a long time while discarding other information more quickly. When your problem space is very small, you can make a model that is exceptionally lightweight for both training and inference.

Not all "AI" models are massive, bloated large language models with billions of weights.