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Comment by chartpath

7 hours ago

Are there any indications that this will be possible? Consumer hardware will continue getting better but I can't see 512GB RAM in a MacBook Pro any time soon. I'm hoping linear attention techniques plus MoE will make breakthroughs in size/compression and throughput.

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chartpath

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majormajor  9 minutes ago

In the last ten years laptop memory footprints have, what, doubled at the low end? Smallest MacBook Pro in 2016 was 8GB, smallest is 16GB today? Max I think has gone up 8x meanwhile, 16 to 128?

I wonder if there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue where there wasn't much that demanded 10x the RAM, so there wasn't much pressure to develop more or increase production to support it at consumer prices.

There's wayyyyyyy more demand for memory generally now, so assuming it's not a demand bubble that pops rapidly, I'd expect the new normal to end up at a much higher baseline. 512GB would be 4x greater than today's max, so even with the relatively slow last 10 years development pace, give it five years max?

nijave  5 hours ago

Well, we're probably not going to be running frontier models anytime soon, but I think the general assumption is smaller models will continue to improve until they're sufficiently good frontier models aren't needed.

There's potentially also augmentation through tools, harnesses and RAG to help boost how well they work without tons of parameters.