Posted by dotcoma 8 hours ago
And here we are, today, with pocket computers whose market was broken by corporate interests, magnitudes more powerful than any $10,000 pc from even 1999, but their intended usage is for 'consumption.' Sure, you can record videos, or take a high quality video, but, for the most part, you can't use them for general compute. You can't setup a database server that would use maybe a cpu core or two of an iphone. The sort of solutions people dreamed of seemed to have been forgotten.
Now we have AI, though, which makes our computers feel limited again. Even with the sophistication of the most bleeding edge flagship GPU from nvidia, you need a massive array to run something like chatGPT, which is still error prone and hallucinates. Can anyone even actually fathom what kind of leaps in techology we'll need to even approach AGI? Will we be any closer to that in 30 years, when people will buy 4090s and H100s for a couple of dollars on ebay for "retro builds" and youtube videos? Or will we enter a sort of dark age induced by the laws of physics, where the sort of progress made in the moores law era of computing becomes a distant memory, and shrinking transistors become an increasing quixotic battle?