[hughw]

  A Fable 5 model running at 9,000 tokens/s on an ASIC rather than 150 tokens/s on electricity chugging Nvidia GPUs, or even giant SRAM Cerebras or Groq chips could be good enough to meet the majority of demand.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

[JacobAsmuth]

Agreed 100%. This guy thinks there's a limit on the demand for intelligence. You think that Fable 7 which can run a billion dollar corporation on its own has no consumer demand just because we have fable 5 at 9k tok/s? Who do you think will be the biggest customer of such a model? Fable 7, obviously.

[jackb4040]

Sorry, which billion-dollar corporation is Fable running "on its own"?

[blep_]

Fable 7 isn't a thing, 5 is the one people are currently excited about. They're talking about a hypothetical more-advanced future version.

[aaronharnly]

They imagined a "Fable 7" model (i.e. two generations hence) which would be capable of such feats.

[drob518]

Of course not. But many tasks won’t require Fable 7 level intelligence and many people won’t want to pay for it. Honestly, I’m using Deepseek v4 Flash a LOT lately to do more mundane tasks because it’s so nearly free and I don’t need Fable or even Opus. Serving those mid-level models at high speeds and low prices is a definite winner for lots of applications. And sure, the frontier models will continue to drive the frontier forward.

[sdfefcxv]

theoretically theres a no limit on the demand of anything if the price is right

pretty stupid statement lmao

[JacobAsmuth]

Marco econ 101 disagrees :) Ask your favorite LLM to explain the "yield curve" to you

[LarsDu88]

Certainly there will be demand for Fable7, but that demand is context specific. Frontier labs' profit is dependent on there being sufficient demand for the next layer of capability and whether the premium consumers are willing to pay for that.

The incremental unlock of capability by ever increasing frontier model sizes will eventually reach diminishing returns.

I would argue tnference speed increases would actually unlock a different kind of more meaningful value for a wider audience.

[dymk]

I am really confused about the point you're trying to make. 150tok/s is slow, but so is 9000tok/s? Or they're both fast? Or 150tok/s should be enough?

[oliyoung]

The "640k should be enough for anyone" quote (even if Gates didn't exactly say it) is making the point is that _right now_ we have no idea about what our future needs and capabilities will be, we can't imagine what "should be enough" will be

640k was enough ... in 1981 ... almost fifty years later is 50,000 lower than a standard off the shelf PC now

[dymk]

If that’s the case I still don’t get it. 640k was enough in 1981, same as how 150 (or 9k) tok/sec would suffice for 2026

The comment seems like the nerd equivalent of 6 7

[everyday7732]

The original quote was supposedly Bill Gates saying that "640kb of memory should be enough for anyone".

The quote became famous because it's a failure to imagine that people would find new uses for computer memory if it became plentiful and cheap. In the quote Gates is not expecting people to come up with more demanding applications for computer memory (RAM) than the ones which were available in 1981.

Computer memory did in fact become plentiful and cheap after this, and computer programs became more complex and memory-hungry and today we wouldn't consider a 640kb an acceptable amount of ram for even the lowest-end device.

OP is repeating the quote about memory to indicate that they think that modern LLMs will be a similar resource. We should not expect that demand for LLM inference will stay flat, and that once everyone has cheap access to Fable level, we won't find new more demanding uses for it.

[hughw]

probably no number you come up with will be adequate for very long. [edit] it's a reference to this possibly apocryphal prediction https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563853/the-640k-quote...

[stickfigure]

> 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

The question is really whether 640k is enough to last you until your next hardware upgrade.

[foobit-dev]

> 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

I get this reference!