alt Hacker NewsIt's a sad trend for "the rest of us" and history in general. The economic boom of the 80's thru the 2010s has been a vast democratization of computation - hardware became more powerful and affordable, and algorithms (at least broadly if not individually) became more efficient. We all had supercomputers in our pockets. This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe.
I am hoping some of that Clayton Christensen disruption the tech theocracy keep preaching about comes along with some O(N) decrease in transformer/cDNN complexity that disrupts the massive server farms required for this AI boom/bubble thing.
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> This AI movement seems to move things in the opposite direction, in that us plebeians have less and less access to RAM, computing power and food and...uh...GPUs to play Cyberpunk; and are dependent on Altermanic aristocracy to dribble compute onto us at their leisure and for a hefty tithe.
Compute is cheaper than ever. The ceiling is just higher for what you can buy.
Yes, we have $2000 GPUs now. You don't have to buy it. You probably shouldn't buy it. Most people would be more than fine with the $200-400 models, honestly. Yet the fact that you could buy a $2000 GPU makes some people irrationally angry.
This is like the guy I know who complains that pickup trucks are unfairly priced because a Ford F-150 has an MSRP of $80,000. It doesn't matter how many times you point out that the $80K price tag only applies to the luxury flagship model, he anchors his idea of how much a pickup truck costs to the highest number he can see.
Computing is cheaper than ever. The power level is increasing rapidly, too. The massive AI investments and datacenter advancements are pulling hardware development forward at an incredible rate and we're winning across the board as consumers. You don't have to buy that top of the line GPU nor do you have to max out the RAM on your computer.
Some times I think people with this mentality would be happier if the top of the line GPU models were never released. If nVidia stopped at their mid-range cards and didn't offer anything more, the complaints would go away even though we're not actually better off with fewer options.
>We all had supercomputers in our pockets.
You still do. There is no "AI movement" you need to participate in. You can grab a copy of SICP and a banged up ten year old thinkpad and compute away, your brain will thank you. It's like when people complain that culture is unaffordable because the newest Marvel movie tickets cost 50 bucks, go to the library or standardebooks.org, the entire Western canon is free
It's not like you need 64GB to have "democratized computation". We used to have 64MB and that was plenty. Unfortunately, software got slower more quickly than hardware got quicker.
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One can see it that way, granted. When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc. All our beloved consumer tech started out as absurdly high priced niche stuff for them. We've been sold the overflow capacity and binned parts. And that seems to be a more-or-less natural consequence of large purchasers signing large checks and entering predictable contracts. Individual consumers are very price sensitive and fickle by comparison. From that perspective, anything that increases overall capacity should also increase the supply of binned parts and overflow. Which will eventually benefit consumers. Though the intervening market adjustment period may be painful (as we are seeing). Consumers have also benefited greatly from the shrinking of component sizes, as this has had the effect of increasing production capacity with fixed wafer volume.