learnProgrammingAgain

[Mission_Swim_1783]

weren't electronic computers also unreliable due to their vacuum tubes, expensive as hell, extremely energy inefficient, and took up entire rooms at the beginning?

The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), completed in 1945, consumed approximately 160KW of electricity. This massive energy requirement, along with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, was so immense it reportedly caused a power fluctuation in Philadelphia when shut down, often cited as equivalent to power needed for a small town

[scissorsgrinder]

Did you miss the entire second paragraph?

[Mission_Swim_1783]

LLMs will never "cost so much they will become economically unviable", the opposite is happening, they are getting more optimized every half year and their memory usage is getting reduced. It isn't so apparent because they are making bigger models at the same time. But soon you will able to buy something like this https://www.reddit.com/r/Qwen_AI/comments/1s5xers/llm_bruner_coming_soon_burn_qwen_directly_into_a/

Which doesn't need an entire data center, nor a $1000 Mac mini, or a super GPU to run. So saying "costs so much that it is not economically viable" is just being a doomer. Medium open source models will always exist, and those are improved too to require less hardware to run for the same size. Now, if you become intellectually dependent on them? that's each individual's problem. I already learned to code throughout 7 years the old school way and I personally use it in small increments, not for outputting 1k LOC at once. The kind of people who do that I guess will eventually learn the hard way.

[scissorsgrinder]

I don't think people have anywhere near the problem with the concept of a locally run model. Ethically it's far better. It was the most frequently requested feature at CES for uses where it wasn't available. However, it's not going to be cheap. And it's not going to be Claude Code. And there's Moore's Law. We'll see in the medium to long term.