> Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point?

Forget about AI, the entire PC market is getting killed over this.

As an avid gamer I'm unsure if in 5 years I can even buy a gaming PC anymore. Not even because of cost, but it's unclear if anyone will still make the components anymore.

NVIDIA isn't interested, nor is AMD.

It's worse than centralization. These AI models have gobbled up all the world knowledge. If for some reason the Internet dies we will have no option but to be dependent on these proprietary, for profit, AI models for any information we need.

You might say that this is impossible but look at current trends. A lot of information today is getting shared in the walled gardens of Internet. You have to login to social media to view posts. The Twitter, Reddit threads that were accessible freely now require you to log in. Similar thing is happening across other networks. People are no longer asking questions on Stackoverflow. All those queries are gonig to AI. If someone chooses to not use AI, their options will be limited in future.

This began with cloud. When software began running as a front-end in a browser, people began complaining about centralization.

But then it became normal.

The monopolization of knowledge and expertise is the next step. I don't mean as if it were intended, but it is the logical progress given the technological evolution. The cause is inventive structures: the tech is neutral (in my opinion), but the way in which it is used and deployed is subject to and disciplined by capital.

Some things will always be true:

- Large centralized compute is more powerful than portable compute

- Wired is better than wireless

- The public wants new things

- The tech industry grows to use/“use” the available processing power

As long as you’re not continuously comparing to AI in large centralized compute, what you’re really looking for is “when does portable compute become powerful enough to run AI models that are capable of meaningful work” and I’d say we’re already there and it’s getting better.

It was the same with cloud and software as a service. We underuse the power of our local machines and pay high cost for modest resources that are bandwidth constrained for most users.

There has been a relatively strong local model community since the days of llama-3. IMO, the number of non-technical people interested in qlora, adapters, parameter fine tuning etc is remarkable.

Don't think of it as a step back, it's just a point in a familiar cycle:

New application of computing requires a lot of compute -> compute centralizes -> compute improves, smaller, faster, cheaper -> compute decentralizes -> new application of compute is found -> (return to beginning of cycle)

Yes, we will. Eventually, specialized AI hardware (ASICs) will emerge that will be good for AI, but not much anything else. PCs are general purpose computers that are good at many things, but excel at few. There are quite a few startups working on it already.

Yupppp. My current conspiracy theory, with all of the increasing hardware costs and how easy decompilation projects are, is that there is going to be a major push to eradicate consumer hardware and keep all software in the cloud.

Everybody will have a mini PC for the sole purpose of streaming content, with no storage to keep anything on it.

You know what that era has in common with fossil fuel? It takes a very specialized infrastructure and supply chain that you can limit with lobbying efforts and gatekeeping so that all the money only flows to you and your cronies.

> It feels like a step back towards mainframe era.

:insert Will Smith presenting meme:

The Cloud

The only way this may happen is when the internet were to be somehow destroyed.

Which would not be all too bad. It would also mean the end of stupid SaaS subscription services, and mass surveillance, adtech. And shitty propaganda.

And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.

I never left the PC era, but the RAM prices kind of hurt me. I don't know when I would want to buy a new PC - it seems to be 3x the cost for barely any real benefits over the status quo.

Yes we will and we all know it. All those are raw materials.

back to the mainframe era came with the insane proliferation of cloud everything, not with ai

There's a lot of hacking going on right now with small (qwen 3.x and gemma 4 based) and medium (deepseek flash and others) models alike.

Have an agentic enough setup and they'll do anything that the biggest closed models can. They'll also do more, making them the true frontier.

A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.

If you're not partaking that's only on you.

The quote assumes that all of humanity has the same goals as a corporation does: that every individual person desires maximum utilization of components for the sake of company shareholders. Individual people want a computer and just can't buy them because the entire world's memory chip supply, flash storage supply, and increasingly hard drive supply is being swallowed into the maws of corporations who would love nothing more than to sell you tiny bits of that compute through a monthly subscription in perpetuity.

Not everyone subscribes to the "cloud compute is more important than everything else" outlook, but everyone is affected by it nonetheless.

Not sure it is "weird".

But saying people shouldn’t want something that was abundant and you made scarce is an asshole thing to say.

It sort of is, no? To agree with it, you need to share the goal of maximum utilization. Sam Altman seems to take that as a given. But clearly people disagree and not just with RAM. Most kitchens and bathrooms are unused most of the time, but that doesn't mean every home having one is bad.

Sam Altman's argument is very conveniently self-serving.

The difference is Codex couldn't shake its preference for making flashy, loud, obnoxious marketing websites that look like they're trying to sell you a SaaS. This website looks like it wants my money. Meanwhile the website from op is simple, focused, and far more comedic than codex's slew of AI-generated "jokes".

We pay $15 for frivolous things all the time

$15 is cheaper than a movie ticket and the creator probably got more enjoyment out of it. Also, sometimes getting a few giggles out of people is return enough out of an investment.

Because it’s cheap and fun?

Social commentary.

It's the proof that people have too much money and should instead give it to Sam Altman that will make a more efficient use of it for our collective wellbeing®.

You dont sound like a geek god.

I believe the kids say "it's for the lulz"

Hey, it’s approximately 13 upvotes a dollar. /s

The quote wasn't weird and made total sense in Altman's POV. It was just egoistic and myopic regarding how people feel about ownership and independence.

The whole context of Sam Altman and other tech billionaires is weird. The modern tech advancements are deeply rooted in exploitation, racism and eugenics, concentrating military, political and economic power, and stealing agency and power of resistance from the common people.

Sam Altman raped his sister, murdered his employee, defrauded Elon Musk and was described as a physco by Aaron Schwartz.

But we're the bad guys for getting the context wrong /s

It's a reference to the old "download more RAM" meme.

I would be shocked if it did anything at all.

From a quick skim of the page source (including a dynamically created iframe) it just does a little animation and locally allocates some useless arrays in JavaScript to waste your "uploaded" RAM.

What are you supposed to do if you want to run a homelab without paying rent to a billionaire?

Altman made things I could buy at a reasonable price unaffordable.

> Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes?

Everything you listed worked for decades with a lot less RAM, but was also more limited and potentially different in substance in critical ways. It's the "Mom I want X ! -> We already have X at home" meme, where the "X at home" is some poor version of what was requested.

I understand some people could still enjoy a retro style experience, but I wouldn't give up on my HDPI displays for instance. Or touch support. Or keeping 40 tabs open instead of hand managing my tabs or rely on some dumb auto-close algo.

Spreadsheets can now have dozens of thousands of line and still be snappy to manipulate, we can play high def videos while doing actual work without freezing the whole system. Photoshop and Lightroom used to be crash junkies for even basic operations and people would baby the settings to aleviate that; with the RAM we have now it has become a somewhat decent situation (still crashes, just way less)

I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.

PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy. Nowadays phones will be enough for most of that, and people will mostly avoid doing them if it requires opening a computer. That's where we have so many budget management apps for instance.

So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.

> And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades.

Strongly recommend you get Gemma 4 12B QAT on a computer that can run it, and then disconnect the internet and see what it can still do. Even the smaller E4B will show you.

Local AI is the first thing in decades (since editing video, perhaps) that meaningfully changes what a disconnected machine is capable of.

If only everyone lived more optimised!!

being correct doesn't mean your reasoning isn't crooked. His implication is "You don't need it, but I do!"

It's a monopoly saying they do not have enough resources. It's the big man saying he needs more food.

The same logic goes the other way -- things functioned well before you could spend hundreds of dollars a month multiplying matrices to spew bloat into your code (or, for that matter, your spreadsheets and slide decks).

As far as I can see, there's no evidence they're colluding here. They're just capturing the money that otherwise would have gone to scalpers.

Apparently the last three times this cycle happened, the manufacturers that built out capacity went bankrupt when it popped, and the ones that didn't didn't, so they're actually being wise.

The RAM industry is littered with corpses. It’s a boom and bust business and fabs are extraordinarily expensive.

>and are now not scaling up production according to demand.

hopefully china does it and hynix burns in hell

>have been proven to collude on price fixing and whatnot

where is the proof?

>and are now not scaling up production according to demand.

fabs are being built by maaany companies, but it takes years

> are now not scaling up production according to demand.

Would you though? If/when the AI bubble pops and the buildout of data centres either stops or plateaus then they'd suddenly be sitting in a vastly oversaturated market and struggle to make it to the end of the year.

> and are now not scaling up production according to demand

1) boom and bust cycle in memory industry is a repeated problem

2) companies are not obligated to scale up

> and is being taken out of context

no it is not - Altman is lying by omission[0] by implicating that various important costs are not real

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50400515 for longer comment on that

Witch hunt?! Sam said something goofy, a goofy little website was made to poke fun at what he said.

Good god the internet is so sensitive nowadays

> but the real villains here are the memory manufacturers

Ah yes Sam Altman is not a real villain despite OpenAI locking up 40% of global DRAM supply.

It was taken out of context for sure but still find this site amusing. Perhaps even prophetic, can we build enough ram and vram for future requirements when theres only a few holding the keys.

Obligatory: "we're curing cancer r-right?" No Nat we're making slop videos with it.

All are responsible - the AI greedy companies and the suppliers.

If the USA were a real democracy they would do something about it. After all this even violates capitalism, e. g. free market leading to reduced prices. But the USA is run by a criminal gang, pocketing away money - the TechBros and their cronies. They just make any legislation they want to, with a bit sugar coating on top to not appear too overly evil or greedy. But they are.

No, the foundries are just redirecting production to HBM, which is in much higher demand.

Except that's nonsense, any company that could make more ram absolutely would because the damand is insane. There is no universe or economy where it would be profitable to artificially lower your production to keep prices high when you can just make more ram.

I feel like you had to live through the download more RAM scam/meme of the early internet to fully appreciate the joke. I remember installing it.

Someone should just FXP it over

What did you expect to happen instead?

Do you also click on the links of the Nigerian princes?

> community based compute donation

also, spare LLM credits from donations for use by community groups

Same. Hope it was a zipbomb right into his mailbox.

Of course, because no human can be sloppy with commits on a stupid one-off joke repo...

You people are obnoxious.

Sam Altman's argument was that people tend to not run their consumer electronics at 100% 24/7, and so views the time that's not happening as wasted potential for RAM that could be sitting in a data center. I sincerely reject that notion, but from that... utilitarian perspective it's hard to argue that spreading out the world's limited RAM supply across thousands of personal machines would fix any issues

Yep. Not only that but the quote (even if taken out of context) is factual. >99% of people load up their computers with comical amounts of ram when they really, really don't need it. This excess then only fuels the creation of memory inefficient apps. People are in shock when I tell them they could take the whole OS state when running any AAA game, reduce memory usage by an order of magnitude (if optimized correctly) and they couldn't spot a single difference. Most of those >200GB game installs could literally be reduced to a few hundred MB (no, you don't need massive textures + you can generate most on the fly).

I get that I'm falling for low quality bait here, but what about him saying that it's terrible for people to have RAM is "fake propaganda"? The entire exact quote is:

> From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.

That's a ghoulish point of view that puts real living humans on a lower hung than the poor poor corporations who just want RAM to be so expensive that everyone needs to buy compute from them. Convenient for the corporations!

This is tremendously fake news. Everbody knows it. The best people say it's fake.