Is Tiiny AI Pocket Lab a scam?

High-Performance Computing Machine Learning, LLMs, & AI
1

Hi guys

I need a few additional opinions on Tiiny AI Pocket Lab (https://tiiny.ai/ and https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiinyai/tiiny-ai-pocket-lab). To me it first looked like scam because they hid so many important information but they opened up a bit and released key specs like the CPU/NPU split. On paper it looks quite ok for models that are small enough (probably the ~30B, even if they claim 120B runs on it). I’ also stumbled upon this article I Reverse-Engineered the TiinyAI Pocket Lab From Marketing Photos. Here's Why Your $1,400 Is Probably Gone. — bay41 that basically destroys all their claims with some calculations.
What are your thoughts on this? Is it a scam? Is it somewhat useable? The reviews on youtube seem to be paid ads and thus they are useless.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

3

Really hard to tell, to be fair. There are linked reviews on the page and one comes from a decent youtuber that does videos on local AI pretty frequently.

There’s also some misleading marketing regarding all the RAM that it has. Full bandwidth is just for 32GB. The remaining 48GB are for the NPU and use a PCIe 4x4 connection.

Last but not least: software support. How is it going to hold up over time? Will they update the whole thing? Can you repurpose it in the future?

Too many questions, too few answers.

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4

probably. just looking at the pictures it looks fishy.

5

I’ll report when I get the thing in the mail, supposedly in August..

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6

Does this Box have some kind of money-back guarantee? In addition to some of the questions already raised, the specs imply a custom SoC (reportedly 12 ARM cores plus dNPU, all with a custom memory controller), and I haven’t seen any information about who designed it and where it is/was fabbed. If they are indeed shipping the box by August, the silicon should be taped out by now.

7

It’s a Kickstarter, so no, there is no money back guarantee. I canceled my pledge. It’s too risky and the specs are not great. They released some more details on the hardware over time, which made me super suspicious. I hope for all the backer that it’s not just a money grab and that they deliver something.

8

And by the time it ships, it will still be as capable…

AI seems fast moving, with models evolving, but at least some lighter weight ones come out..

9

Yes and yes. Somewhat usable and definitely paid ads. Them and Tuya refuse to send samples without editorial say and sending me money. And I don’t do that so I didn’t get one. Same reason I don’t have a $700 desk chair, I don’t give editorial say in reviews, or take money for reviews.

Open sponsor spots are ok, but when you want to present a sponsored video as a legit review and not an ad, like they did, that’s an integrity thing and you lose my trust immediately.

10

That confirms my suspicions regarding the “reviews”. Also no-one was allowed to show proper numbers or the exact specs regarding the memory split. they published that info way later.