[chartpath]

Are there any indications that this will be possible? Consumer hardware will continue getting better but I can't see 512GB RAM in a MacBook Pro any time soon. I'm hoping linear attention techniques plus MoE will make breakthroughs in size/compression and throughput.

[carter2099]

> but I can't see 512GB RAM in a MacBook Pro any time soon

Could totally see this being a comment from a forum in like 1994 but swap out GB for MB and MacBook Pro to whatever the popular consumer pc was at the time

[r-w]

Yeah but the price of RAM wasn't increasing at that point.

[nijave]

Well, we're probably not going to be running frontier models anytime soon, but I think the general assumption is smaller models will continue to improve until they're sufficiently good frontier models aren't needed.

There's potentially also augmentation through tools, harnesses and RAG to help boost how well they work without tons of parameters.

[deadbabe]

There will be a 1024GB unified memory MacBook Pro.

[TranquilMarmot]

Not at a price that your average consumer can afford for a long, long time

[matheusmoreira]

Certainly not any time soon, but I have faith it'll happen one day.

[majormajor]

In the last ten years laptop memory footprints have, what, doubled at the low end? Smallest MacBook Pro in 2016 was 8GB, smallest is 16GB today? Max I think has gone up 8x meanwhile, 16 to 128?

I wonder if there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue where there wasn't much that demanded 10x the RAM, so there wasn't much pressure to develop more or increase production to support it at consumer prices.

There's wayyyyyyy more demand for memory generally now, so assuming it's not a demand bubble that pops rapidly, I'd expect the new normal to end up at a much higher baseline. 512GB would be 4x greater than today's max, so even with the relatively slow last 10 years development pace, give it five years max?

[regularfry]

The problem is that the situation in the RAM market might just... not go away. It's locked in for the next couple of years unless the AI market goes pop. Which it might! But if it doesn't, there's no particular reason to think that the incentives for cornering the market like OpenAI have would go away.

We might see that new normal in five years or so. We will see a new normal sooner than that if there's a run on AI because of the sudden availability of DRR fab capacity, but also we'll probably see the level of local models freeze at whatever state they've got to at that point. But an equally likely outcome is that any new DDR capacity that comes online is just immediately absorbed by frontier AI, and consumer devices stay at "just good enough" for a decade.

[mikestorrent]

The new Macbook Neo is 8GB. I think that if we are lucky, the huge RAM demand right now means new factory buildouts which eventually means more supply and prices go back down, and capacity begins to go up. This level of demand was just not anticipated by anyone.