Comment by thih9
4 hours ago
Centralization is nonironically my biggest problem with AI. It feels like a step back towards mainframe era.
Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point? I hope so.
4 hours ago
Centralization is nonironically my biggest problem with AI. It feels like a step back towards mainframe era.
Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point? I hope so.
This began with cloud. When software began running as a front-end in a browser, people began complaining about centralization.
But then it became normal.
The monopolization of knowledge and expertise is the next step. I don't mean as if it were intended, but it is the logical progress given the technological evolution. The cause is inventive structures: the tech is neutral (in my opinion), but the way in which it is used and deployed is subject to and disciplined by capital.
> Will we go back to PCs? As in: are we going to get cheap local hackable frontier AIs at some point?
Forget about AI, the entire PC market is getting killed over this.
As an avid gamer I'm unsure if in 5 years I can even buy a gaming PC anymore. Not even because of cost, but it's unclear if anyone will still make the components anymore.
NVIDIA isn't interested, nor is AMD.
Today I opened newegg for the hell of it and figured I'd look at the cost of a 2 TB NVMe ... Fuck man. This is seriously depressing.
BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.
Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.
To amend this: Reading the 8088 domination article and the little $8 RISC-V Linux board I think we have plenty of opportunity. Maybe we learn to shed our inefficient BIG computers for small, low power, purposeful, yet general computers. I play with Plan 9 a lot and its portability, small footprint, low resource, and distributed design has showed me we can do a lot with a little as long as we stay disciplined to keep things simple and to the point.
I think there is a second order effect of this: it won't be worth making games for PC. At least, large budget games.
It also won't be worth it to make games for next gen consoles if the prices end up being what people are saying. So in the end they'll just keep doing what they're doing right now, and not increase the hardware requirements of their games.
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not true. it wont be worth it anymore to implement Path Tracing or Ray tracing which is absolutely not needed for a prime gaming experience. its deterimental even because ull only get into games with a certain type of person who can afford a big machine.
Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.
AI slop-cloning is killing small indie games too.
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There a lots and lots of great games that will run on computers that would be considered low power today. And I’m not even talking about older games.
I'm still hoping some future LLM is good and small enough for people to run local AI for everyday life.
It's interesting trying to be an AI "moderate," which as the owner of a 16gb card I definitely am. Still working on the balance, but it really does feel like I'm going to land on something like "use external AI services to build a few tools, but use my local rig to actually handle everything personal once those tools are built."
Already here. 3.8-27b is good enough.
5 years ago it would have been science fiction
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Its interesting because I was at Costco the other day and they weren't even selling PCs unless they were gaming ones. It seems most consumer electronics have switched over to laptops.
Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.
Most of it has switched to mobile phones and tablets. It doesn't help that almost everywhere digital classroom means tablet instead of laptop. Sure, the control is convenient for the teacher, but it also means we are raising our children in walled gardens. So much so, that whole generations don't even leave that garden in their spare time.
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It's also killing the console market. Sharp drops in all console sales after "adjusting" to ram prices.
Not just the Console and PC's market, the Phone market to. On my country before, IDR 2.000.000, you can have a 8GB phone with G100 Ultimate. How about Now? On that price, you'll just got the 4/128 with Unisoc T7250.
What is more sensible: Listening to the best music on an average sound system or listening to average music on the best sound system?
There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.
intel makes gpus :). Maybe games will be finally made again in a way that a PC can run them without needing a 3k GPU in there to get toward half the refreshrate of your monitor.
gaming does not equate to only things like the last of us or cyberpunk which need extreme machines. a lot of visual fidelity can be reached still without having such a monster. Just need to not use certain features which are currently pretty much exclusive to Nvidia...
Cyberpunk runs even on steamdeck, it doesn't need an extreme machine.
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At least you'll be able to get a Pi 5 for $700.
Pi6 might get very close to buisiness usage but i guess microsoft will use just more cpu/gpu for windows to stop that from happening.
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On the bright side, you’ll be able to play Skyrim-halo-Pokémon-Minecraft as much as you want.
I'm just sticking with Tetris.
If the AI bubble bursts and prices normalize because demand for AI hardware is reduced, then these companies might pay more attention to other markets like gaming again. But who knows the future anyway.
Regarding graphics capabilities, haven't we reached "good enough" like a decade ago? Does anyone actually want to see ultra realistic gore when attacking an enemy? I'd also submit that photorealistic art style is not the most popular one either nowadays except for a handful of special sims like race car driving.
If not for adults, my opinion is that teenagers/younger generations are gonna be interested within buying ultra-realistic games. Aside from Minecraft, Roblox, GTA 5 as indie games, most players in this age do in my opinion play AAA games or the most solid graphics game that the world has to offer (as much as their laptops allow them to)
It's worse than centralization. These AI models have gobbled up all the world knowledge. If for some reason the Internet dies we will have no option but to be dependent on these proprietary, for profit, AI models for any information we need.
You might say that this is impossible but look at current trends. A lot of information today is getting shared in the walled gardens of Internet. You have to login to social media to view posts. The Twitter, Reddit threads that were accessible freely now require you to log in. Similar thing is happening across other networks. People are no longer asking questions on Stackoverflow. All those queries are gonig to AI. If someone chooses to not use AI, their options will be limited in future.
Not only if the internet dies. If the country or countries managing the AI decide they don't like your country and ban you from using their (major) AI providers, in a world where most knowledge and work tanks will require access, you're screwed.
Not even talking dictatorship scenarios here. The USA might simply decide it doesn't like your country. Or maybe heavily cripple the models you can use, or censor them, for whatever reason.
I guess this is an argument for local AI. Probably not feasible for the less technically savvy.
I have high hopes for AMD Halo / NVidia Spark or sth. similar - relatively open computers (unlike Apple) with unified memory. Now if those prices just came down a bit... :-/
We currently have politicians in the U.S. talking about “stopping” AI.
So it’s plausible they’ll block me from accessing Mistral since they host DeepSeek models.
They're already censored
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Some things will always be true:
- Large centralized compute is more powerful than portable compute
- Wired is better than wireless
- The public wants new things
- The tech industry grows to use/“use” the available processing power
As long as you’re not continuously comparing to AI in large centralized compute, what you’re really looking for is “when does portable compute become powerful enough to run AI models that are capable of meaningful work” and I’d say we’re already there and it’s getting better.
Also:
- local latency is lower than network latency
- latency is important for action games
It was the same with cloud and software as a service. We underuse the power of our local machines and pay high cost for modest resources that are bandwidth constrained for most users.
One consequence has been lower power requirement for local machines. This is partly why a 2015 MacBook is still perfectly serviceable for basic use in this day and age.
The AI boom first reversed the trend, to now try to get back to that cycle.
People long ago stopped buying computers and started using Saas on their mobile devices instead. Ask HP.
HP was making shit laptops that barely worked a decade before SaaS was a known acronym.
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People keep saying that but I have never met anyone who doesn't own a PC or laptop.
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Don't think of it as a step back, it's just a point in a familiar cycle:
New application of computing requires a lot of compute -> compute centralizes -> compute improves, smaller, faster, cheaper -> compute decentralizes -> new application of compute is found -> (return to beginning of cycle)
Can you think of examples of this cycle? I know this is roughly what happened with mainframes, but I struggle to think of other times it went like that.
Maybe arcade games?
There has been a relatively strong local model community since the days of llama-3. IMO, the number of non-technical people interested in qlora, adapters, parameter fine tuning etc is remarkable.
that was when RAM and GPUs were cheap. Now that is dying, too.
Only people who have no concerns about privacy would give up on it entirely.
But yes, it has been a test of just how few tokens you can get by on.
Yes, we will. Eventually, specialized AI hardware (ASICs) will emerge that will be good for AI, but not much anything else. PCs are general purpose computers that are good at many things, but excel at few. There are quite a few startups working on it already.
The only way this may happen is when the internet were to be somehow destroyed.
Which would not be all too bad. It would also mean the end of stupid SaaS subscription services, and mass surveillance, adtech. And shitty propaganda.
And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.
> And your local AI could emulate the good parts of the internet.
Like talking to people?
People did not live in social isolation before the internet existed.
In fact, it was closer to the opposite.
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Trump and AI-power security research are both doing a good job of promoting installable software!
You know what that era has in common with fossil fuel? It takes a very specialized infrastructure and supply chain that you can limit with lobbying efforts and gatekeeping so that all the money only flows to you and your cronies.
> It feels like a step back towards mainframe era.
:insert Will Smith presenting meme:
The Cloud
back to the mainframe era came with the insane proliferation of cloud everything, not with ai
Yes we will and we all know it. All those are raw materials.
I never left the PC era, but the RAM prices kind of hurt me. I don't know when I would want to buy a new PC - it seems to be 3x the cost for barely any real benefits over the status quo.
most games which require that big PC are poorly optimised and often times they arent even fun. these companies focus on visual fidelity and give all their engineers insane machines to build the games on. that has beenn destroying PC gaming way before AI/LLMs came into the picture.
I am using AI now to make a game engine that will run and make 'nice enough' graphics on simpler machines. things like laptops with iGPU and 4gb of ram.
U can still get quite ok graphics, and make very complex and rich gameplay systems using such a machine. It just needs to be the target machine while developing so the right tradeoffs are made.
Which is not a bad thing per se: most of use could use our devices a little longer than we usually do.
Yupppp. My current conspiracy theory, with all of the increasing hardware costs and how easy decompilation projects are, is that there is going to be a major push to eradicate consumer hardware and keep all software in the cloud.
Everybody will have a mini PC for the sole purpose of streaming content, with no storage to keep anything on it.
I don't know how much of a conspiracy that is. If the current trend of hardware costs keep rising to the point of pricing people out of having any real compute locally, and chip makers actively de-prioritizing consumer-grade memory, GPUs, etc, companies will (more) heavily push thin clients and streaming for everything.
I really don’t see it happening at all, not with current trends, you can barely run Win11 on 8GB ram anymore
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I would have laughed at the thought a few years ago, but now I am slowly starting to adopt some of the viewpoints of American second amendment hardliners.
It's just unfortunate that producing a half decent computing platform is significantly more difficult than a rifle (and that in the case of said hardliners, the capital is backing them, here it's working against us).
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There's a lot of hacking going on right now with small (qwen 3.x and gemma 4 based) and medium (deepseek flash and others) models alike.
Have an agentic enough setup and they'll do anything that the biggest closed models can. They'll also do more, making them the true frontier.
A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.
If you're not partaking that's only on you.
> A sensible point of entry is a 2899$ Mac mini.
> If you're not partaking that's only on you.
There's honestly nothing sensible about that for a lot of developer budgets across the globe. Don't assume most folks have $3k to burn.
Yes, but that's a lot of money if you don't already have the hardware, plus you'll still be paying for electricity costs. (No comment on relative capabilities.)
$3k being a point of entry for a pale imitation of the models being compared to is not very inspiring.
Yes but then you'd have to give closed-ecosystem-ass Apple money, which is worse than giving it to Nvidia who at least support linux properly. And you still get prompt processing speeds of a leisurely sloth.