The future is thin clients for everyone, requiring a minimal amount of RAM and storage because all they are is a glorified ChatGPT interface.

I'm running multiple services such as Forgejo, Audiobookshelf, Castopod and they all need no more than roughly 100 MB RAM.

There is one exception though. Open WebUI with a whopping 960 MB. It's literally a ChatGPT interface. I'm only using external API providers. No local models running.

Meanwhile my website that runs via my own Wordpress-like software written in Rust [1] requires only a few MB of RAM, so it's possible.

[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx

You know what is the sad part. I don't think software developers or LLMs know how or want anymore to make low resource consumption software that runs on a thin client. It will be some browser based thing capping to whatever memory is available on the system.

It won't last. If the demand is sustained then new factories will open up and drive the price down.

More likely a couple of big financing wobbles lead to a fire sale.

It isn't practical for HDD supply to be wedged because in 5 years the disks start failing.

Even if the AI bubble bursts, having successfully cornered the compute market they can just go rent seeking instead by renting out cloud workstations, given that they've made the hardware to build a workstation yourself unaffordable.