This is insane! I can't wait until technology progresses to the point we can run these things on consumer hardware!
Could totally see this being a comment from a forum in like 1994 but swap out GB for MB and MacBook Pro to whatever the popular consumer pc was at the time
There's potentially also augmentation through tools, harnesses and RAG to help boost how well they work without tons of parameters.
I wonder if there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue where there wasn't much that demanded 10x the RAM, so there wasn't much pressure to develop more or increase production to support it at consumer prices.
There's wayyyyyyy more demand for memory generally now, so assuming it's not a demand bubble that pops rapidly, I'd expect the new normal to end up at a much higher baseline. 512GB would be 4x greater than today's max, so even with the relatively slow last 10 years development pace, give it five years max?
We might see that new normal in five years or so. We will see a new normal sooner than that if there's a run on AI because of the sudden availability of DRR fab capacity, but also we'll probably see the level of local models freeze at whatever state they've got to at that point. But an equally likely outcome is that any new DDR capacity that comes online is just immediately absorbed by frontier AI, and consumer devices stay at "just good enough" for a decade.
so around US$150k which is Small/Medium-Enterprise territory already, but who knows when it will hit "reasonable" home consumer territory
I think there's hope future generations of unified memory machines may get this sort of memory availability when new fabs open in then next couple of years and then ramp up production for a few years afterwards - that makes ~2030s credible at this point, but nobody can really predict the market that far ahead
I hope you're right. This is a very exciting idea. The weights are out there. The demand is astronomical. The manufacturers just need to make it happen.
I'm a tad worried about triggering a run on the particular hardware I'm buying though so I'll leave it vague here, but hit me up on Discord if you're curious.
