upvote

points

by throw0101a4 hours ago |
comments
upvoteby wccrawford2 hours ago|
next
[-]
That's exactly the point. Until recently, AI models that could run on home machines were so bad that it was very hard to imagine anyone wanting to.

And, like the overly large machines of 1977, models are getting faster, leaner, and better. It's happening a lot quicker, though.

reply
upvoteby Silhouette24 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
This is why I'm bearish on Anthropic, OpenAI, and friends. I am not confident that we will continue to see the same pace of improvement in frontier model capabilities as we have seen over the past year or two - not using similar mathematics at least. But I think that getting results that are close enough to the same standard to be a realistic substitute but in a model small enough to run locally may well happen quite quickly. And if it does - where is the moat to defend these AI organisations with their astronomical budgets when they're already starting to price more realistically and that's already killing a lot of the hype they've enjoyed until very recently? They have an accidental moat because they bought up the global supply chain for storage but that surely isn't going to last once the data centres to hold that storage are becoming liabilities.
reply
upvoteby kristov2 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
We kinda ended up with terminals connected to mainframes anyway. The terminal being the web browser, and the mainframe being SaS. So it wasn't that far off.
reply
upvoteby supermatt1 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
the network is the computer
reply
upvoteby parineum3 hours ago|
prev|
next
[-]
It doesn't really need this much explanation.

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.

reply
upvoteby michaelcampbell2 hours ago|
parent|
next
[-]
> It's similar to the gates quote about RAM (I think it was 64KB?)

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...

reply
upvoteby Shorel47 minutes ago|
parent|
[-]
That exact quote? No, never. He said something like: current computers at the time had 64kb of RAM, so the OS was designed with a limit of 640kb, and he believed this would give them 10 years of future proofing. As it happened, that limit was reached much faster, in about 6 years.
reply
upvoteby glimshe3 hours ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
Or maybe he simply made a mistake. Big deal. This doesn't speak negatively of his other achievements.
reply
upvoteby shermantanktop3 hours ago|
parent|
[-]
He had a long career and presumably many successes, and is fallible like the rest of us. But a half-remembered zinger with no context makes for zippier posts I guess.

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.

reply
upvoteby wslh2 hours ago|
prev|
[-]
The simple explanation is that predicting the future is generally impossible. It doesn't matter if it's Olsen or anybody else.
reply