> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> It feels like a step back towards mainframe era.

:insert Will Smith presenting meme:

The Cloud

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.

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.

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.