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Comment by psygn89 | Hacker News Reader

I think todays latest models would satisfy most users, so it makes me wonder how soon until we can run it on our machines without having to subscribe and with China handing us freebies? I think they have dug well past the point of profitable returns before that happens, so I can see why big tech companies are scrambling to get into bed with US government more than ever as a backup plan when/if their big gamble fails. And now our corrupt government and its 3 letter agencies, they have bargaining power to use this tech and relax privacy efforts and add more backdoors for "safety and security" whereas in the past it was easier for these companies to say no. A match made in hell that we are all roped into now.

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> I think todays latest models would satisfy most users, so it makes me wonder how soon until we can run it on our machines without having to subscribe and with China handing us freebies?

Because of the DRAM shortage, not anytime soon. But if you’re willing to pay for inference somewhere else, Deepseek Flash 4.1 is good enough [1]. It might be going to be extra cheaper soon, too [2].

[1]: https://www.dgt.is/blog/2026-10-07-deepseek-freek-out/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50163277

Well once their current majority buyers go bust (potentially without paying for their outlandish orders) what's left of the memory cartel + the Chinese will have to sell memory to real people again.

Good news is that CXMT is ramping up DRAM production, and given how things went with solar and EVs, I'd expect Chinese ram will soon flood the market at very reasonable prices. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/13/cxmt-memory-chip-stock-rout....

> I think todays latest models would satisfy most users

This reminds me the famous (although unproven) "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

There are probably cases where it's true though. 4K screens have been declared good enough, computers have come with 16GB of ram for forever now, etc.

It could be less that the current models are good enough forever but that if the prices for proprietary models get too high, people will switch to open or self hosted options. We have not even begun to exhaust the possibilities of the current models.

That 16GB forever is 2 years and was walked back in march of this year.

That quote apocryphal btw. No evidence Gates ever said it. And even if he did, does the fact that it was wrong imply the converse is true? Will everyone always need a better model at ANY cost?

If model development stopped today it would still take decades for the productivity benefits to diffuse through society.

He might not have said it (in public at least), but he became a billionaire by building a whole business model on it, by exploiiting the ecosystem with that limitation. So it doesn’t really matter that he now denies to have said it, actions speak louder than words.

The vast majority of LLM usage probably would pass evals equally well on a smaller model

I see tons of devs fretting about how only Opus is "smart" enough for the React CRUD web app they are building even though Sonnet and Chinese models are demonstrably equivalent for most real world developer use cases

I've been thinking since Opus 4.5 came out, that if I had near unlimited usage of that I could do some immensely interesting things.

If Cerebras burned Opus 4.5 to a chip that I/anyone could buy for $5k, that would be worldchanging.

it's probably closer to 50k than 5k

His counterfactual?

I wouldn't buy my own at that price, but I imagine that that would make it available at cloud providers at prices/speeds that would still be world changing

seriously. today's models are good enough because they're... today's models.

Today’s models are not good enough, they need constant supervision to come close to humans.

I think this is why Anthropic is pushing so hard towards the platform side of things. They are trying to build their own source control, document storage, artifacts etc... That's why people will buy it because it becomes an operating system for businesses enabled by AI.

Still some way to go until we run "it" on our own machines. Even with current "mid to high end" hardware you barely reach the same quality and speed with a free LLM compared to what Opus or Astra delivers. In numbers: A 3k Euro Macbook with 32 GB RAM allows you to run a (hard guess only) up to 16 GB Model. Alone! Not speaking about sub agents here. Because you still need memory for your everday work and other programs, cache, context etc.

Well, if there is demand, it will be possible over time. 3D graphics also went from each frame being generated for hours on a compute farm to real time 3D games running on a phone.

Doing some googling against DeepSeek for which more stats are openly available: We need

~508GB+ Uncompressed memory

~256Gb with 3-bit compression (about 3 bits per weight)

~128Gb with 1-bit compression (1.58 to 2.3 bits per weight)

So uncompressed is still about an order of magnitude out of most home systems' reach, but with compression it's not far off.

When you spend 1k/month of LLM api calls. That doesn’t sound all too unreasonable to have locally in the near future.

Regulations can't save them. Everyone will just use open weights.

Apple will do it eventually

Apple isn't doing this. Apple is creating experiences, not frontier models.

Infrastructure.

Im sure there was a time nobody thought Apple would design their own CPU's.

Foolish poster.

You misunderstand my comment.

Apple is very good at what they do. They will move mountains and invent new technologies to achieve their goals. But the goal is not the technology itself -- it's the experience.

People complained Macs had underpowered hardware. That's because Apple didn't need overpowered hardware to achieve the experience they wanted. Same for iPhone, and how it still has less memory than Android flagships -- by as much as half in some cases, or even more. But they simply don't need more for the experience. (Though recently they have felt the RAMpocalypse)

I believe the same will happen here, and everywhere. Apple will not release a frontier model just because they can. They won't pull ahead just for the sake of it. But there is a high likelihood that they will create much a better experience, that doesn't need a model to be at the frontier.

Of course, they also make considerably powerful machines now. Pushing your hardware to the limit is a significant experience these days, and Apple sees the market for it. Even if they do not create the next frontier model themselves, we may eventually find one running on Apple hardware anyway.

I also think that it is not just user experience, but developer experience that stands to benefit. Apple's developer experience has been rotting since Jobs died, but I still hold out hope that they will pull through. Call me foolish for that, though, if you must.

Capitalism says no, AI bros move between models rapidly for even small improvements.

Companies are likely to follow enthusiasts' methods to make moving easier once they stop getting Sweetheart below cost deals.

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