At this point I don’t see the difference between the U.S. or China what it comes to privacy concerns anymore. US might be even worse. Run locally if you want privacy. At least Chinese make it possible.
That’s where this is going. I think we’re one year away from being able to use Opus 4.6 levels of coding performance on a 3k laptop. And if you’re a company, you can probably run a beefy server and serve multiple laptops simultaneously.
I sometimes feel like the whole industry forgot the entire mainframe vs the desktop battle that birthed the PC industry when we discuss AI.
Moore's law, even if it has had the occasional slow down or hiccup, always wins over time. 128gb or more of local memory will likely be in many cellphones within a decade.
The first iPhone had only 128mb of RAM. Today I can buy one with 12gb - in just under 20 years we got a ~9275% increase in RAM. I can get 24GB in flagship Android handsets.
Even if we only get 3000% storage space growth in the next 10 years, that still grants us all an iPhone with ~370gb of RAM. Gosh knows what high end desktops and laptops will be packing...
Of course a lot of AI processing is going to push out to the edge.
If you want the masses to run locally, try squeezing the memory requirements down even more. 8GB of system RAM is not uncommon IRL, I suspect.
Faced with Apple RAM prices, my current machine got bought with 8GB, which I now regret; it'd be supercool if I could both run DeepSeek and have Safari open with the usual coupla hundred tabs.
