Imagine if people had said one day computer programs had to be more memory constrained because everything uses too much RAM. Madness. We'd never see 128GB of RAM.

We would be lot better off. I am very weirded that computers are one of the place where waste is sometimes even celebrated. We would be laughed out if we suggested same with say energy in general. Why have walls, we could just have enough space heaters to always push warm air or cool air... Saying we need walls stops us reaching point where we heat or cool ourselves in outdoors constantly.

This is actually how Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google recommends doing thought exercises to challenge assumptions (watch is recent YX Startup School talk). The end goal isn’t “128GB of RAM”, the goal is “useful effective software”. If for whatever reason RAM was an immovable constraint, a different tech tree would emerge.

The tech tree where we develop tech to have tons of RAM is better and leads to more opportunities than the tech tree where everything is built for only a handful of GB of RAM. We may never have had LLMs if we didn’t go down the first path.

Or maybe we’d have LLMs that fit in a handful of GBs (and we technically already do). It’s hard to tell without completely going down that parallel universe and simulating all the milestones in it, but it’s a fun thought experiment.

There is likely no way to have a decent LLM fit in a handful of GB and be as useful as the frontier ones we have today.

Yeah but energy is still a cost, and local inference without batch and multiplexing for many users (like an office would be) is even less optimal. I'm not sure I think it's just pushing the problem forward

Then there will also be a push for cheaper, freer energy as well.

Yeah, with all the AI needs we’ll just have to transition to fusion energy.

And geothermal.

Not even for the environmental aspects, just purely from energy demands, at any spot on the Earth where a data center could go.

Hahahahaha sorry, that's hilarious.

Indeed, but I also think structural considerations must be done at the company level on the work model overall

Interestingly hackernews commenters are the main reason of this fear

For context, this is an answer to a more pessimistic outlook here: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing...

Thank you for explaining that

Man it doesn't post automatically

Great analysis, you should open a blog with your great abilities

That's why LLM exist, you can go there, paste the link and specify the number of words you want the synthesis. Or just take a few minutes and read it entirely. Nobody forces you.

It is not name dropping, the last name is literally mentioned along with the name of the book.