[londons_explore]

It doesn't matter. However much intelligence you can squeeze into 1 GB, people will always want more.

Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.

[CamelCaseName]

Your example contradicts you.

2K, 4K, and 8K+ TVs have been around forever, and although 4K has become the norm, it's widely accepted that there isn't much benefit for most people above 1080p

[HelloMcFly]

> it's widely accepted that there isn't much benefit for most people above 1080p

Is it? By whom? For larger TVs, closer distance, or a combination of the two, there absolutely is value from 4k. https://i.rtings.com/images/optimal-viewing-distance-televis...

Though I'm unlikely to ever upgrade from 1440p on my computer, personally.

[t-3]

Talking about resolution is pointless without mentioning screen size and display tech. PPI is better, but doesn't always work well comparing between technologies.

[brianwawok]

Depends on distance and size, there is a lovely chart. My projector at 10 feet away is night and day difference at 4k. Mathematically 8k should look identical, so I haven’t spent the money to try it to confirm.

The 1080p thing is true in the age of 40” TVs but not so much now, think Costco has a 95” TV if not 100”.

[phatfish]

I can definitely tell the difference between 1080 and 4k on my 55inch at around the recommended viewing distance. Less so on a 42 inch. A 4k image will look good even on a projector, as you say.

Personally I think 4k (with HDR) is good enough for consumer use, so agree with the parent theoretically just not quantitatively.

It did take around 20 years from DVD to 4k Bluray though.

[StilesCrisis]

It depends on TV size. If you've ever experienced Netflix on a 75" TV, 1080p content looks mediocre on it. So really it's better expressed as "there isn't much benefit for most TV sizes."

[broeng]

I wont quite argue, that 1080p is always enough on a 75", but your example is more a Netflix problem; their compression results in hideous quality, and it's not really representative of what 1080p could be.

[StilesCrisis]

Granted, maybe Netflix wasn't the best example, but I was just trying to be succinct.

[oblio]

Yeah, but that's based on a hard limits, the physics of the eye. The example was poorly chosen.

[t-sauer]

Your example also counters your point: A lot of people do not care about 4k, and even less do care about 8k or above. We reached a point where most people are completely happy with the quality they get.

[lelanthran]

> Your example also counters your point: A lot of people do not care about 4k, and even less do care about 8k or above. We reached a point where most people are completely happy with the quality they get.

And when (not if) we get to the 4k (or 8k) equivalent of LLMs, they'll just be baked into hardware and we'll have near instant responses while running locally.

There is no future where OpenAI, Anthropic, etc survive with their current business model; at some point we will hit a point where training a new model is done only every 5 years or so, and in that scenario we aren't going to be running models of pricey server GPUs with latencies measured in seconds and full responses measured in minutes.

We'll be running locally with sub-millisecond latencies and responses measured in milliseconds. There is no way for any big company to compete with the current business plan of selling inference or subscriptions.

[andrekandre]

  > a point where training a new model is done only every 5 years or so

not to take away from your point, but 5 years is a long time to be out of date (esp with programming languages)... or maybe im misinterpreting?

[seb1204]

I dare say many are watching on handheld devices and not big screens. At least a sizeable percentage I would say. My guess.

[phoghed]

Likely constrained by the fact people are mostly watching low bitrate Netflix streams.

[sureglymop]

Don't forget that it's only an assumption that scaling more results in better models. There may be a ceiling to that. If that is hit and the best performing possible model can run in little VRAM, your argument here doesn't hold anymore.

In a way it is actually the same thing that makes us accept AI as working in the first place. It only needs to be good enough for human perception. The same is probably true for compute.

[oblio]

I'd argue we've already hit the ceiling. Can you truly tell the different between SOTA models from 9 months ago and those from today? There are some improvements but they're mostly marginal.

Plus there is a chance the actual scaling that matters is beyond our reach. Think instead of TB models, PB or ZB models. We don't even have that kind of information. Humanity in its entire history hasn't generated 1ZB of information.

[xyzsparetimexyz]

> Can you truly tell the different between SOTA models from 9 months ago and those from today

On a task that corresponds to the benchmarks, yes absolutely.

[overfeed]

> On a task that corresponds to the benchmarks, yes absolutely

The very definition of diminishing returns.

[flohofwoe]

FWIW I still play PC games on 1080p (also has the nice side effect that I don't need to buy an overpriced highend GPU, nor use upscaling hacks like DLSS which trash image quality).

[lelanthran]

> Standard Def TV was plenty for 50 years. But when more was on offer, everyone went for it, and now you can't even buy a 480p TV.

And yet when we hit 4k, that's were people just stopped buying higher res. 8K is still useful, but only when the screen is so large that it doesn't fit in the room :-/

[bogdan]

There's barely any media in 8k. There's so many ppi you can squeeze before your eye can't tell the difference anymore.