简而言之：通过一个设备端小型分类器来路由后台 AI 工作，仅将最困难的任务发送至云端，即可在一台 Mac 上将吞吐量提升两倍，并清空任务队列。
我桌上的笔记本电脑现在能处理 78% 的 AI 工作，其余部分则发送至云端。这一转变源于我的技能蒸馏工作。
具体运作方式如下。
我在 Asana 中创建任务。一个智能体看到任务后——例如日程安排、邮件分类、调研、CRM 更新——会将其分类为简单或困难。如果是简单任务，我 Mac 上的本地模型几秒钟就能处理完毕；如果是复杂任务，同一模型会将其路由至云端模型。
在过去七天里，每日峰值达到了 88%。
随着工作负载增长，这种双车道设计开始显现成效。吞吐量提升了约 25%，平均任务耗时从 47 秒降至 19 秒，队列等待时间从 73 秒降至 4 秒。工作内容本身没有任何变化。小而快的任务不再需要排在大而慢的任务后面等待。
这个使用蒸馏技能的任务工厂现在运行顺畅，吞吐量提升了 25%，队列等待时间降低了 94%，系统响应也快得多。目前，云端处理那困难的五分之一，Mac 处理其余部分。
这就像是智能体工作领域的小型钢厂。纽柯公司的小型钢厂起步时规模小、资本轻、贴近需求；一代人的时间之内，它们就超越了那些综合性钢铁巨头。
每一台拥有足够内存来运行蒸馏模型的笔记本电脑、手机和边缘设备，都变成了自己的小型钢厂：本地路由，只为那困难的五分之一支付云端费用。未来几年内，数以千万计这样的设备将在企业内部普及，悄无声息地吸收掉如今大量出现在超大规模云服务商账单上的工作。
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纽柯公司始于20世纪60年代，其生产方式并非在大型综合高炉工厂中冶炼铁矿石，而是采用电弧炉熔化废钢。每一家微型钢厂在规模和成本上都仅为综合钢厂的一小部分，选址靠近区域需求地，并依靠灵活且成本较低的劳动力运营。综合钢厂曾不屑地认为，微型钢厂只适合生产钢筋这类低端产品。但在接下来的三十年里，纽柯公司逐步向高端市场进军，生产钢板和结构钢梁。到2014年，它已成为美国最大的钢铁生产商，而大多数综合钢铁巨头（如伯利恒钢铁、LTV钢铁、国家钢铁）则已破产。克莱顿·克里斯坦森在《创新者的窘境》一书中，将这个故事作为颠覆性创新的经典案例。 ↩︎
In short : Routing background AI work through a small on-device classifier sends only the hardest tasks to the cloud, tripling throughput & emptying the queue on a single Mac.
A laptop on my desk now handles 78% of my AI work, with the rest sent to the cloud. The shift came out of my skill distillation work.
Here’s how it works.
I create tasks in Asana. An agent sees the task : scheduling, email triage, research, a CRM update ; & classifies it as easy or hard. If it’s straightforward, a local model on my Mac handles it in seconds. If it’s complex, the same model routes it to a cloud model.
Across the last seven days, daily peaks reached 88%.
As the workload grew, the two-lane design paid off. Throughput jumped about 25%, average task duration fell from 47 seconds to 19, & queue age dropped from 73 seconds to four. Nothing about the work changed. Small, fast tasks simply stopped waiting behind big, slow ones.
The task factory that uses distilled skills is now humming along with 25% more throughput, queue age down 94%, & a much more responsive system. For now, the cloud handles the hard fifth. The Mac handles the rest.
It’s the minimill of agentic work. Nucor’s minimills1 started small, capital-light, & close to demand; within a generation they outflanked the integrated steel giants.
Every laptop, phone, & edge device with enough memory to host a distilled model becomes its own minimill : routing locally, paying cloud rates only for the hard fifth. Tens of millions of these will proliferate inside companies in the next few years, each one quietly absorbing much of the work that today shows up on a hyperscaler invoice.
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Nucor began in the 1960s by melting scrap steel in electric-arc furnaces rather than smelting iron ore in giant integrated blast-furnace mills. Each minimill was a fraction of the size & cost of an integrated plant, sited near regional demand, & ran on flexible, lower-cost labor. The integrated mills dismissed minimills as fit only for low-grade products like rebar. Over the next thirty years Nucor moved up-market into sheet steel & structural beams, & by 2014 had become the largest steel producer in the United States, while most of the integrated giants (Bethlehem, LTV, National) had gone bankrupt. Clayton Christensen used the story as the canonical example of disruptive innovation in The Innovator’s Dilemma. ↩︎