Raspberry Pi's New AI Hat Adds 8GB of RAM for Local LLMs

Posted by ingve 1/15/2026

Raspberry Pi's New AI Hat Adds 8GB of RAM for Local LLMs(www.jeffgeerling.com)

256 points | 209 commentspage 3

JustFinishedBSG 1/15/2026||

It's useless for LLMs and it's actually slower than Hailo 8H for standard vision tasks, so, why ?

myrmidon 1/15/2026||

Are there significant usecases for the really small LLMs right now (<10b distills and such)?

My impression so far was that the resulting models are unusably stupid, but maybe there are some specific tasks where they still perform acceptably?

arkmm 1/15/2026|

They're still very good for finetuned classification, often 10-100x cheaper to run at similar or higher accuracy as a large model - but I think most people just prompt the large model unless they have high volume needs or need to self host.

tonymet 1/15/2026||

Can someone share a non-theoretical LLM application that demands local inference and pocketable hardware? The internet hype for these is sky high, but the actual results are disappointing.

yjftsjthsd-h 1/15/2026||

Any chance you can split layers so that some run on the CPU and some run on this board to let you run bigger models and/or get better performance?

wyldfire 1/15/2026||

I wonder -- how does this thing compare against the Rubik Pi [1]?

[1] https://rubikpi.ai/

philipallstar 1/15/2026|

Is that affiliated with raspberry pis in some way, or are they just freeloading on the "pi" suffix to confuse people?

Elfener 1/15/2026|||

> are they just freeloading on the "pi" suffix to confuse people?

Yes, but that is normal I guess:

- https://banana-pi.org/

- http://www.orangepi.org/index.html

- https://radxa.com/products/rockpi

wyldfire 1/15/2026|||

They are "freeloading" indeed but in this case it is a valuable indicator that it should be physically compatible with many add-ons/attachments that are compatible with the Raspberry Pi.

bdavbdav 1/16/2026||

Have we not all given up on pis at this stage? I’ve got ESP32s for edge I/O, Nucs/VMs for the crunch. What’s the Pi doing?

scq 1/16/2026|

There are definitely use cases. Pis have lower power consumption than NUCs. This is the main reason I went for one to run Home Assistant rather than a NUC.

I have a NAS/home server that I could put it on but I don't want my home automation going down when I tinker with it.

bdavbdav 1/16/2026||

I think I’ve got too used to VM snapshotting to turn away from it for HA.

1970-01-01 1/15/2026||

It does seem like this is a marketing gimmick. I doubt it will have worked in terms of sales numbers. "What else does it do?"

incomingpain 1/15/2026||

I wonder if this is the magic hardware for LiquidAI/LFM2.5-Audio-1.5B

Dont need more than 8gb. It'll be enough power. IT can do audio to audio.

kotaKat 1/15/2026|

"For example, the Hailo 10H is advertised as being used for a Fujitsu demo of automatic shrink detection for a self-checkout."

... why though? CV in software is good enough for this application and we've already been doing it forever (see also: Everseen). Now we're just wasting silicon.

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