Comment by oliyoung
18 hours ago
The "640k should be enough for anyone" quote (even if Gates didn't exactly say it) is making the point is that _right now_ we have no idea about what our future needs and capabilities will be, we can't imagine what "should be enough" will be
640k was enough ... in 1981 ... almost fifty years later is 50,000 lower than a standard off the shelf PC now
If that’s the case I still don’t get it. 640k was enough in 1981, same as how 150 (or 9k) tok/sec would suffice for 2026
The comment seems like the nerd equivalent of 6 7
The original quote was supposedly Bill Gates saying that "640kb of memory should be enough for anyone".
The quote became famous because it's a failure to imagine that people would find new uses for computer memory if it became plentiful and cheap. In the quote Gates is not expecting people to come up with more demanding applications for computer memory (RAM) than the ones which were available in 1981.
Computer memory did in fact become plentiful and cheap after this, and computer programs became more complex and memory-hungry and today we wouldn't consider a 640kb an acceptable amount of ram for even the lowest-end device.
OP is repeating the quote about memory to indicate that they think that modern LLMs will be a similar resource. We should not expect that demand for LLM inference will stay flat, and that once everyone has cheap access to Fable level, we won't find new more demanding uses for it.