Comment by rmunn

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".