Comment by jiggawatts
9 hours ago
This is the exact same type of comment I heard about computer hardware upgrades for three decades in a row.
“Very few people actually require a Pentium workstation, a 486 is perfectly adequate for the majority”
The logical fallacy is taking an extant distribution of “product capability” that is priced to fit what the market will bear and assuming the “next upgrade” simply tacks on a little bit more to the right hand rail of that curve.
No!
It shifts the entire curve!
Everything for everyone gets better and the top 1% of the most demanding users will continue to pay the same-ish premium.
“Nothing” will change.
Look at it this way: you can buy a $200 laptop for your kid or a $20,000 Mac with an M5 Ultra processor.
BOTH are vastly more powerful than either a $200 PC or a $20,000 “workstation” from 20+ years ago.
Look at: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text?q=openai&utm_source=chatgp...
The “budget” 5.5 Instant model beats o1 and o3 which were “pro” models at the time of their release!
Intel didn't just surf some natural wave of demand for higher power personal computers. Intel found new needs for powerful PCs, especially in gaming, and they put a lot of marketing and industry relations dollars behind PC gaming.
In other words. PC users didn't figure out that they could buy super powerful PCs and play games on them, that was a carefully managed market transition.
What is going to do the same for LLMs?
> Intel found new needs for powerful PCs
It wasn't "Intel" that found new uses for PCs, it was everybody who found new uses for them. Billions of people and millions of companies found uses for "more computer power".
It was only the journalists with limited imaginations (and no industry experience) who struggled to come up with potential uses.
> carefully managed market transition.
You make it sound like a conspiracy! It wasn't. It was simple capitalist competition. If Intel hadn't improved their products, their competitors would have left them behind.
That very nearly happened ten years ago because Intel become stuck on the 14nm process and their products stagnated while Apple, ARM, and AMD lapped them repeatedly.
> What is going to do the same for LLMs?
Everybody.
Are you saying that unless you're "carefully managed" by some third-party, you could not find any use for "unlimited intelligence on tap"?