this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2026
710 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
89355 readers
3228 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They are the way to go, but hardware pricing makes it cost-prohibitive to match frontier capabilities, which makes decomp and recomp difficult. Or rather, they require more skill and take longer, introducing some barriers against the current floodgates being flung open.
We all know the eye-watering prices GPUs and RAM cost now, to say nothing of Unified Memory devices like the Strix. Most people just don't have a spare $10K to throw at an inference box that can run (say) a 300B model at interactive (not batch) speeds.
Coming at this from another angle tho, I note that according to Steam stats, the most popular GPUs are in the 8GB and 16GB range...which is smack bang in the VRAM range of what a good MoE (say, Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B) runs on (for 8GB) or arguably the best local dense coder (Qwen 3.8 27B) can live at. Which leaves us with a capable assistant and a capable coder.
I think there's probably room for LLM improvement in the 8–16GB range too...and given that most consumer PCs and laptops live there, I'm sanguine the open-weight devs might make it happen.
But I also suspect the gatekeeping of high-end capacities is intentional.
We're probably not going to have the ability to vibe code Mario into Elden Ring again...not without significantly more skill. Dunno.