Comment by observationist
15 hours ago
Moore's law never ceases to amaze (the vulgar version where we're talking compute/dollar, not the transistor count doubling rate.) It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters. It's hard to even imagine the things that will be running on billion dollar clusters in 10 years.
I do hope you're right, but I'm quite skeptical. As mobile devices get more and more locked down, All that memory capacity gets less and less usable. I'm sure it will be accessible to Apple and Google models, but models that obey the user? Not likely
As state of the art machines continue to chase the latest node, capacity for older nodes has become much less expensive, more openly documented, and actually accessible to individuals. Open source FPGA and ASIC synthesis tools have also immensely improved in quality and capability. The Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 contains an open source Risc-V core designed by an individual. And 4G cell phones like the https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-pro are available on the market built around the very similar ESP32. The latest greatest will always be behind a paywall, but the rising tide floats all boats, and hobbyist projects are growing more sophisticated. Even a $1 ESP32 has dual 240mhz 32bit cores, 8Mb ram, and fast network interfaces which blow away the 8bit micros I grew up with. The state of the open-source art may be a bit behind the state of the proprietary arts, but is advancing as well.
It's really fun to have useful hardware that's easy to program at the bare metal.
Even when technically accessible to individuals it still costs at least 10k$ to get a batch of chips made on a multi project wafer.
3 replies →
> compute/dollar
That's ironic because building a PC is getting more expensive than last year for the first time.
Heh, well, they didn't say memory/dollar
> ... It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters.
Maybe, perhaps phones will have the compute power... But not enough memory. If things continue the way they are, that is. Great for AI firms, they'll have their moat.
DRAM price actually hasn't decreased much over the last 10 to 15 years. In the decades before, there was a huge increase in memory capacity, perhaps even exponential like for transistors.
In the same way we have websites running on disposable vapes, it may not be long before such a device could run a small local LLM, and lots of appliances could have a local voice interface - so you literally talk to your microwave!
I don't think you're going to see phones with 512gb VRAM+RAM in your lifetime.
When I was a kid I recall my cousin upgrading his computer to 1 or 2 MB so that we could get some extra features when playing Wing Commander 1. That was 1990.
35 years later, burner phones regularly come with 4 GB of RAM these days. 3 order of magnitude difference, not taking into account miniaturization and speed improvements.
In another 35 years who knows what will happen. Yeah things can't improve at the same pace forever but I would be surprised if anyone back in 1990 could predict the level of technology you can get at every corner store today.
Maybe it's not that everyone gets an RTX 5090 in our pocket, but maybe it's that LLMs now can run on rpi. Realistically it's probably something in the middle.
This is a joke right? Not even 10 years ago the first phones with 4GB RAM came out, today there are quite a few phones with 24GB. At that rate we'll be at 512GB by around 2040.
I don't think there are "quite a few" phones with 24GB. For example, even the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which is one of the most expensive ones out there, only has 12GB DRAM.
A tech-optimist would perceive this as a death-threat! :,-)
When I was a kid in Elementary we used DOS computers with maybe 4MB of RAM or few MB and the Play Station wasn't many times powerful. A few years (two or three) later we got Windows 95/98 with 128 times more RAM. A few years later, computers could emulate more or less the PSX and the N64, all within six years.
The PlayStation 5 (16GB) has only twice as much RAM as the PlayStation 4 (8GB), and the PlayStation 6 will likely have just 1.5x as much as the PS5: 24GB. And even that might be optimistic with the recent explosion of memory price.
They will not build that phone because then you won’t subscribe to AI cloud platforms.