Comment by rmunn
6 hours ago
And right now the demand for GPU is far outpacing the supply, even with factories at full production, which is keeping prices high and out of reach of most people. But unless something happens to shut down the factories (not impossible, but hasn't happened yet), eventually production will catch up to demand and prices will return to sane-ish levels. Won't happen this year, almost certainly not next year... but I would be shocked if the current high prices were to persist for a decade. Eventually the percentage of people who can afford that hardware will grow to be a decent chunk of the computer-owning population. And they'll be following READMEs written by the early adopters, for installing open-source harnesses to work with open-weight models.
My personal expectation is closer to 5 years than 10, which is why I wouldn't touch Anthropic or OpenAI stock with a ten-foot pole, personally, no matter how high their theoretical valuation is. Because their business model is doomed in the long run.
Newer cards aimed at consumer market are not capable of being used for local models the way 3090s are. That's on purpose: this capability is now used to price-differentiate between "normies playing games" and "companies in data center business".
For now. That won't last forever. Yes, it'll take quite some time to work through the current production backlog, which is why I'm predicting five years, not one or two. But the trajectory has always been "new video card comes out, game devs push the limits of what it can do, gamers buy new card so the hot new game can run faster, rinse and repeat". And that includes wanting more VRAM so the game can load more of the scene at once, load higher-res textures, etc.
Which means it's inevitable that eventually, even the consumer game market will be buying GPUs with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. And there are decent models that will run at that size. Even the "normies playing games" market, as you call it, will end up with the capacity to run local models. It'll take a few more years than it would have if the data-center companies weren't trying to buy up all the GPUs, but it's not like gamers are going to stop wanting to play games. So in the long run, Anthropic et al are still going to have to figure out how to deal with competition from local models that run on your gaming video card. Which won't ever be at parity with the models that take terabytes of VRAM to run, but are very rapidly approaching "good enough for what most people want to do".