The tech tree where we develop tech to have tons of RAM is better and leads to more opportunities than the tech tree where everything is built for only a handful of GB of RAM. We may never have had LLMs if we didn’t go down the first path.
Or maybe we’d have LLMs that fit in a handful of GBs (and we technically already do). It’s hard to tell without completely going down that parallel universe and simulating all the milestones in it, but it’s a fun thought experiment.
There is likely no way to have a decent LLM fit in a handful of GB and be as useful as the frontier ones we have today.