Comment by xingped
10 hours ago
Ah yes, like my RAM, SSDs, and GPUs are trickling down right now? You're absolutely right! I love a trickle of PC parts!
10 hours ago
Ah yes, like my RAM, SSDs, and GPUs are trickling down right now? You're absolutely right! I love a trickle of PC parts!
This is a temporary anomaly due to the datacenter buildout, which will not last forever. Historically, tech has always trickled down. Sooner or later, hardware will again become cheap.
"Temporary" is a few months. We're looking at many multiple years before parts even _begin_ to decline in price, if even. How much will we as consumers lose in the time it takes for this to correct? This is not "temporary", this is a decimation of an entire product sector for the foreseeable future. There is no historical precedent for this. Companies are not and will not slow down gobbling up literally every tech part they can. Every year, training and running AI will demand more resources over and over and we will continue to be charged increasing amounts for everything because everything costs more either directly or upstream of us. It is a literal cancer.
> Every year, training and running AI will demand more resources over and over and we will continue to be charged increasing amounts for everything because everything costs more either directly or upstream of us.
Unless we are really going to hit the Singularity and create Godlike superintelligence that improves beyond all limits, sooner or later the models will stop improving, no matter how much compute we throw at them. After that happens, the best models will be etched into model-specific ASICs with weights fixed in mask ROM (like Taalas is already doing), which will result in massive, order of magnitude inference efficiency increase. Couple this with the training datacenters suddenly becoming available for inference, and the cost of compute will plummet.
Yes, it might take a few years, but the hardware will be cheap again. And if the result of the whole process is human-level AI, then it will be worth it in the end.
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