Comment by deadbabe
13 hours ago
Imagine if people had said one day computer programs had to be more memory constrained because everything uses too much RAM. Madness. We'd never see 128GB of RAM.
13 hours ago
Imagine if people had said one day computer programs had to be more memory constrained because everything uses too much RAM. Madness. We'd never see 128GB of RAM.
We would be lot better off. I am very weirded that computers are one of the place where waste is sometimes even celebrated. We would be laughed out if we suggested same with say energy in general. Why have walls, we could just have enough space heaters to always push warm air or cool air... Saying we need walls stops us reaching point where we heat or cool ourselves in outdoors constantly.
This is actually how Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google recommends doing thought exercises to challenge assumptions (watch is recent YX Startup School talk). The end goal isn’t “128GB of RAM”, the goal is “useful effective software”. If for whatever reason RAM was an immovable constraint, a different tech tree would emerge.
The tech tree where we develop tech to have tons of RAM is better and leads to more opportunities than the tech tree where everything is built for only a handful of GB of RAM. We may never have had LLMs if we didn’t go down the first path.
Or maybe we’d have LLMs that fit in a handful of GBs (and we technically already do). It’s hard to tell without completely going down that parallel universe and simulating all the milestones in it, but it’s a fun thought experiment.
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