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Comment by karp773 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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

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

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.

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