alt Hacker News> 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.
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I think there is a second order effect of this: it won't be worth making games for PC. At least, large budget games.
There a lots and lots of great games that will run on computers that would be considered low power today. And I’m not even talking about older games.
I'm still hoping some future LLM is good and small enough for people to run local AI for everyday life.
Its interesting because I was at Costco the other day and they weren't even selling PCs unless they were gaming ones. It seems most consumer electronics have switched over to laptops.
Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.
It's also killing the console market. Sharp drops in all console sales after "adjusting" to ram prices.
What is more sensible: Listening to the best music on an average sound system or listening to average music on the best sound system?
There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.
intel makes gpus :). Maybe games will be finally made again in a way that a PC can run them without needing a 3k GPU in there to get toward half the refreshrate of your monitor.
gaming does not equate to only things like the last of us or cyberpunk which need extreme machines. a lot of visual fidelity can be reached still without having such a monster. Just need to not use certain features which are currently pretty much exclusive to Nvidia...
On the bright side, you’ll be able to play Skyrim-halo-Pokémon-Minecraft as much as you want.
I'm just sticking with Tetris.
If the AI bubble bursts and prices normalize because demand for AI hardware is reduced, then these companies might pay more attention to other markets like gaming again. But who knows the future anyway.
Regarding graphics capabilities, haven't we reached "good enough" like a decade ago? Does anyone actually want to see ultra realistic gore when attacking an enemy? I'd also submit that photorealistic art style is not the most popular one either nowadays except for a handful of special sims like race car driving.
Today I opened newegg for the hell of it and figured I'd look at the cost of a 2 TB NVMe ... Fuck man. This is seriously depressing.
BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.
Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.
To amend this: Reading the 8088 domination article and the little $8 RISC-V Linux board I think we have plenty of opportunity. Maybe we learn to shed our inefficient BIG computers for small, low power, purposeful, yet general computers. I play with Plan 9 a lot and its portability, small footprint, low resource, and distributed design has showed me we can do a lot with a little as long as we stay disciplined to keep things simple and to the point.