There is probably no way that I can word this without my comment getting massively [flagged] and [dead] and me getting mass reported to the moderator. Considering the current state of things.

But isn't mister Altman correct in a sense? Why the hell would people need 16 gigabytes of RAM or more to make spreadsheets and type documents? Receive and send e-mail, make travel bookings, listen to music and read the news. Maybe make posts on social media, or publish on your own website.

Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes? And that most of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the megabytes? I remember this time, and certainly must many of you. Of course it is more comfortable today with more powerful machines

There must come a moment when we judge a machine or a system by the results they produce, by the fruits of the tree so to say. And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades. There is one big improvement that undeniably requires more memory from the computer that I can think of, which is the much higher resolution of displays of today. Probably there are some more.

Specialized use is of course different, whether that's compiling code, rendering photogrammetry scenes, or playing graphics intensive games.

> Have we forgotten that all of this functioned very well when RAM wasn't even in the gigabytes?

Everything you listed worked for decades with a lot less RAM, but was also more limited and potentially different in substance in critical ways. It's the "Mom I want X ! -> We already have X at home" meme, where the "X at home" is some poor version of what was requested.

I understand some people could still enjoy a retro style experience, but I wouldn't give up on my HDPI displays for instance. Or touch support. Or keeping 40 tabs open instead of hand managing my tabs or rely on some dumb auto-close algo.

Spreadsheets can now have dozens of thousands of line and still be snappy to manipulate, we can play high def videos while doing actual work without freezing the whole system. Photoshop and Lightroom used to be crash junkies for even basic operations and people would baby the settings to aleviate that; with the RAM we have now it has become a somewhat decent situation (still crashes, just way less)

I still have 10~20 years old machines around and boot them occasionally, there's just no way I'd get back to them full time and try to do the same volume of work as I'm doing now.

PS: there's also the "people only do email and browsing, perhaps some Word or Excel" fallacy. Nowadays phones will be enough for most of that, and people will mostly avoid doing them if it requires opening a computer. That's where we have so many budget management apps for instance.

So, computer are a lot more niche than before, and the requirement also go higher. People on computer are either power users or doing somewhat intensive things.

> And those fruits haven't changed or improved noticeably in decades.

Strongly recommend you get Gemma 4 12B QAT on a computer that can run it, and then disconnect the internet and see what it can still do. Even the smaller E4B will show you.

Local AI is the first thing in decades (since editing video, perhaps) that meaningfully changes what a disconnected machine is capable of.

What are you supposed to do if you want to run a homelab without paying rent to a billionaire?

Altman made things I could buy at a reasonable price unaffordable.

If only everyone lived more optimised!!

being correct doesn't mean your reasoning isn't crooked. His implication is "You don't need it, but I do!"

It's a monopoly saying they do not have enough resources. It's the big man saying he needs more food.

The same logic goes the other way -- things functioned well before you could spend hundreds of dollars a month multiplying matrices to spew bloat into your code (or, for that matter, your spreadsheets and slide decks).

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