alt Hacker NewsThe future is thin clients for everyone, requiring a minimal amount of RAM and storage because all they are is a glorified ChatGPT interface.
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I'm running multiple services such as Forgejo, Audiobookshelf, Castopod and they all need no more than roughly 100 MB RAM.
There is one exception though. Open WebUI with a whopping 960 MB. It's literally a ChatGPT interface. I'm only using external API providers. No local models running.
Meanwhile my website that runs via my own Wordpress-like software written in Rust [1] requires only a few MB of RAM, so it's possible.
You know what is the sad part. I don't think software developers or LLMs know how or want anymore to make low resource consumption software that runs on a thin client. It will be some browser based thing capping to whatever memory is available on the system.
Even if the AI bubble bursts, having successfully cornered the compute market they can just go rent seeking instead by renting out cloud workstations, given that they've made the hardware to build a workstation yourself unaffordable.
It won't last. If the demand is sustained then new factories will open up and drive the price down.
More likely a couple of big financing wobbles lead to a fire sale.
It isn't practical for HDD supply to be wedged because in 5 years the disks start failing.
Is this an inevitable future? The amount of people ready to cede their computational resources, thinking, digital sovereignty, to centralised platforms, all in the name of progress, is truly shocking to me, especially in the current political moment.
The main reason I do not prioritise AI usage in my own life is to retain my skills and mental acuity. All of the forms of computing and opportunities that I value do not require AI to achieve. I can understand why people feel differently from me, though, because AI and AI-adjacent things are where all of the money is right now.