Two Years of Local AI on a Laptop: When Open Models Outpaced Moore's Law

Between May 2024 and May 2026, significant advancements in open-weight AI models outpaced Moore's Law on MacBook Pro laptops with static hardware specifications. Despite the maximum memory remaining at 128 GB across three generations of MacBook Pro chips, the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score of the most sophisticated model available for these laptops jumped from 10 to 47, demonstrating more than twice the improvement rate of traditional hardware developments as predicted by Moore's Law. This remarkable progress was driven by innovations in software, specifically through the use of sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, aggressive quantization techniques, and reasoning-tuned dense models. These advancements allowed for more efficient memory usage and greater intelligence per parameter, enabling the execution of increasingly complex AI models on unchanged hardware. As the hardware ceiling remains a potential constraint, any future improvements will likely rely on further model optimizations unless hardware upgrades occur.