We have and use way more RAM than in 2007
For reference, that was the year Vista came out with a minimum memory of 512MB, with 1GB suggested.
Surely this will make them finally realize it is unsustainable to demand consumer to upgrade their hardware every few years?... Right? Right??
Yes your old PC can act as a thin client to remote into all this server capacity that we are building out. Just sign up for this subscription for the low price of ~~4.99~~ ~~7.99~~ 15.99 a month
Hah, you think it's 15.99 a month....

Some of you are real power users, we are now changing billing from a fixed monthly cost to usage based. The price will be $1 per BILLION CPU instructions, quite the deal! And if you get our "Social Media+" package all compute for Facebook, Xitter, and TikTok is half off!
With ~~5s~~ ~~10s~~ ~~15s~~ 30s unskippable adds every once in a while
They say those who actually made fortunes during the gold rush were the ones selling the pickaxes.
Maybe I should get into the guillotine business...
I still believe that half this swell is artificial, supported by an entire greedy industry that is blatantly price-gouging. Yes there's a real boom, but just like egg producers who artificially inflated their prices during the egg crisis well beyond the new stress point, the same thing is happening here. We're all being fucked and swindled at every possible opportunity.
Every stars are aligned. We are At the top level of capitalism greed. For decades tech companies have piled up as much cash as possible sucking every dime selling their product. Now they want to rent their service instead. The best to do that is to host the service on a super computer, the user having only a low power terminal. They deliberately crippled the os to use the maximum ram and said we need to update our computer for ai and other things most don’t want, don’t need and don’t have the money to pay for it. The best move is to exchange their huge pile of cash to drain the whole market to build data centres. They now want everyone to become dependant on ai and pay them a significant part of our salary to satisfy their shareholders.
This. These companies (Microsoft, Google, etc) are using OUR computer's Ram, Hard drive space and CPU time to run their very own Skynets and making us pay for the privilege.
It's the Golden Calf all over again.
Gonna upgrade my server with another 16gb of ddr3 soon.
£30.
It should be noted that they haven't become harder or more expensive to make. They just cost more.
Just wait till the bubble bursts.
Well, the current trajectory points to:
-
LLM capabilities topping out.
-
All the tooling around them not keeping up anyway.
-
Actual “AGI” being distant and completely unrelated to contemporary models.
-
Inference costs plummeting.
The last one is critical.
Right this second, you can run Minimax H3 on a desktop for the tiny fraction of the compute/RAM OpenAI Sora took. And it’s better.
In a month, it will be ~8X faster.
You can run DeepseekV4 flash, dirt cheap, and get what Claude was less than a year ago. And it’s gonna spread to every host out there, to systems like Cerebas ASICs that don’t even need HBM.
So… Even if you’re an AI acolyte. And we go with that for the sake of argument…
We don’t actually need all that RAM for hosting generative models?
I’m very interested to see what happens to all these datacenters over the next two-three years.
They spent all this money on something that’s gonna be cheap as dirt to run, largely run locally, and that won’t need GPUs once bitnet takes off, sooo… they can’t make money off that.
What happens then?
What happens to all those Stargate RAM wafers, and excess datacenters?
What happens to all those Stargate RAM wafers, and excess datacenters?
The bigger question is what happens to the world-economy when the largest players bottom out and the companies betting on them are massively downgraded because of their huge investments in a fantasy about eternal growth. Hope everyone is setting aside extra cash; it's gonna make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
About the only upside to this that I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, programmers will start being more frugal with their memory usage. Everything else just sucks.
Nah. They'll use AI to code everything, and now you need more RAM to continue...
programmers will start being more frugal with their memory usage.
They 100% will.
Windows had started only "certifying" machines with 32gb as "windows ready" because they wanted the headroom to cram on AI features and use what we pay for instead of a data center.
But because no one was buying 32gb machines and a machine without that sticker will end up with Linux....
They just dropped it, and now they'll have to keep optimizing for 16gb instead of just letting everything bloat. If they don't, they risk every entry level machine making people eventually switch to Linux for a much better experience. Windows has to run on entry level or people don't get sucked in, no one converts to windows later in life.
That's a huge deal, if 32gb was the default for windows it would be the default for everything. Every game and design/modeling program would feel safe to assume 32gb was the norm. Like, imagine what chrome would do assuming there's 32gb to play with.
Now they can't, and they'll know requiring 32gb will cut off some possible consumers.
It's not like Windows is the good guys tho, it never should have been 32, and arguably should be 8gb forever, even if it required a lightweight mode. Most people would prefer a super stripped down Windows even with 64gb. Most of the bloat is useless, I could live without any updates after we didn't have to quit to DOS to launch a game.
There are only a handful of things billionaires hate more than dropping prices of anything.
Once again, thanks Madoff Altman for buying up all the chip supply just to monopolize it. I'm never gonna let that go.
Gordon Moore is turning in his grave
The new Moore's Law: the amount of RAM you can afford halves every six months.
Almost like it was planned to prop up a noncompetitive business model.
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