alt Hacker NewsThis is the exact same type of comment I heard about computer hardware upgrades for three decades in a row.
“Very few people actually require a Pentium workstation, a 486 is perfectly adequate for the majority”
The logical fallacy is taking an extant distribution of “product capability” that is priced to fit what the market will bear and assuming the “next upgrade” simply tacks on a little bit more to the right hand rail of that curve.
No!
It shifts the entire curve!
Everything for everyone gets better and the top 1% of the most demanding users will continue to pay the same-ish premium.
“Nothing” will change.
Look at it this way: you can buy a $200 laptop for your kid or a $20,000 Mac with an M5 Ultra processor.
BOTH are vastly more powerful than either a $200 PC or a $20,000 “workstation” from 20+ years ago.
Look at: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text?q=openai&utm_source=chatgp...
The “budget” 5.5 Instant model beats o1 and o3 which were “pro” models at the time of their release!
Intel didn't just surf some natural wave of demand for higher power personal computers. Intel found new needs for powerful PCs, especially in gaming, and they put a lot of marketing and industry relations dollars behind PC gaming.
In other words. PC users didn't figure out that they could buy super powerful PCs and play games on them, that was a carefully managed market transition.
What is going to do the same for LLMs?