Digging into this:
> In conclusion, there is evidence that Ken Olsen did doubt the need for computers in the home, but the evidence is based primarily on the testimony of David Ahl who was perturbed when the personal computer project he championed at DEC was not supported by Olsen in 1974.
> Olsen’s resistance may have been similar to that expressed by another DEC executive, Gordon Bell. In 1980 Bell thought home terminals would act as gateways to remote computers which would provide appropriate services.
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/09/14/home-computer/
It was supposedly said in 1977: most computers at that time were not small, and so it would not be surprising that people would not expect the general public to desire a large, power-hungry, noise-y apparatus in their house.
And, like the overly large machines of 1977, models are getting faster, leaner, and better. It's happening a lot quicker, though.
People take these quotes out of context all the time. Said in a business context, there was no need, at that time, for someone to have a personal computer.
There's no business justification in 1977 for a personal computer department at a business. It's similar to the gates quote about RAM (I think it was 64KB?).
These statements aren't meant to be forever quotes. Their business plan quotes.
640, and Bill Gates said he either never said that, or at least never remembered having said it. I think there is no evidence anywhere that he did.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563853/the-640k-quote...
The early popularity of Minitel, the continued popularity of ssh/tmux, and the web browser itself indicates that bespoke client applications are not the only way. He wasn’t directionally wrong.
Nobody ever said that, at least not as an assertion or prediction. The actual instances of similar language are from multiple people describing their earlier thoughts before they learned it wasn’t true.
Local models aren’t deterministically equivalent in capabilities to foundation models. Home computers are turing complete; just like a mainframe. They are just slower. Often not slower enough to matter.
I think there’s a sweet spot currently with munging your data blindly on the server so that your client device battery still lasts all day.
Meanwhile Apple and others push on with making client side models more efficient so that eventually the server costs and complexities go away.
You could run a pretty good home server on $50 of gear and yet we never saw any real adoption of OwnCloud/NextCloud style products as an alternative to Google Drive/Photos or Apple Cloud.
Why should LLM/Transformers be any different? Especially when you need a proper expensive GPU to run them instead of a Raspberry Pi?
On-device AI is going to be important, I think. It doesn't have to take the form of a chatbot UI to be useful.
Maybe if you ask them that question, but if you show them two products, they'll definitely prefer the faster one. 30 seconds is a long time to watch a progress bar.
People definitely aren't going to accept more expensive + slower ...