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Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

A single, used 3090 costs more than I have ever spent on a computer.

Yes, the tunnel vision around local models on this site is crazy. The percentage of people in the world who can afford the hardware is extremely low.

It seems roughly similar to the pricing level of personal computers in the early eighties (i.e. IBM PC and Apple Macintosh). I’d expect prices to come down significantly over the next few years. Not so much in the next year or two, but after that.

Just like for warships, the complexity and cost of building cutting edge hardware has grown exponentially up to a point where a significant chunk of the world's computing is dependent on 2 companies: ASML, TSMC. We shouldn't extrapolate linearly from examples from the 80s.

No, but I wouldn’t expect it to stagnate like with Intel in the 2010s either. Maybe the biggest caveat is that most people will be fine with using cloud providers, so the market for non-server hardware won’t be subject to as much competition.

That's in nominal dollars. However, inflation since then has been about a factor of ten to fifty and it hasn't trickled down at all.

I don't think there is tunnel vision. I'm just saying that I have a couple 3090s I invested in a handful of years ago, and they are still going strong today as multiple GPU-needing technologies emerged.

I'm not saying everyone has to run local LLMs, because the APIs are in a race to the bottom, and my $10 of OpenRouter credits I bought months ago is down to $8.94 because most models give you MILLIONS of tokens for a US Quarter.

> I'm just saying that I have a couple 3090s

This is tunnel vision. The percentage of people who could afford the hardware you could at the time you back it so vanishingly small. I do not know a single non-tech person who has multiple graphics cards in a single computer.

And right now the demand for GPU is far outpacing the supply, even with factories at full production, which is keeping prices high and out of reach of most people. But unless something happens to shut down the factories (not impossible, but hasn't happened yet), eventually production will catch up to demand and prices will return to sane-ish levels. Won't happen this year, almost certainly not next year... but I would be shocked if the current high prices were to persist for a decade. Eventually the percentage of people who can afford that hardware will grow to be a decent chunk of the computer-owning population. And they'll be following READMEs written by the early adopters, for installing open-source harnesses to work with open-weight models.

My personal expectation is closer to 5 years than 10, which is why I wouldn't touch Anthropic or OpenAI stock with a ten-foot pole, personally, no matter how high their theoretical valuation is. Because their business model is doomed in the long run.

Newer cards aimed at consumer market are not capable of being used for local models the way 3090s are. That's on purpose: this capability is now used to price-differentiate between "normies playing games" and "companies in data center business".

For now. That won't last forever. Yes, it'll take quite some time to work through the current production backlog, which is why I'm predicting five years, not one or two. But the trajectory has always been "new video card comes out, game devs push the limits of what it can do, gamers buy new card so the hot new game can run faster, rinse and repeat". And that includes wanting more VRAM so the game can load more of the scene at once, load higher-res textures, etc.

Which means it's inevitable that eventually, even the consumer game market will be buying GPUs with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. And there are decent models that will run at that size. Even the "normies playing games" market, as you call it, will end up with the capacity to run local models. It'll take a few more years than it would have if the data-center companies weren't trying to buy up all the GPUs, but it's not like gamers are going to stop wanting to play games. So in the long run, Anthropic et al are still going to have to figure out how to deal with competition from local models that run on your gaming video card. Which won't ever be at parity with the models that take terabytes of VRAM to run, but are very rapidly approaching "good enough for what most people want to do".

I mean, I'm not rushing out to buy that kind of hardware myself, but it is a matter of perspective. People commonly spend an order of magnitude more on a car, and that's just the sticker price.

It's a decreasing pool as well I'd say, the dev machine I built last summer would make less financial sense to me now for example.

There's a non-small contingent who lucked into the periodic games machine upgrade at the right time to snag a {3,4,5}090 rig just before everything exploded. It's a small contingent now but it was less so then. And now those people can add a second card for roughly what that whole system would have cost new originally.

The current supply chain problems will eventually pass.

So will the stock of 3090s, as well as their ability to run contemporary local models. And there will be no supply of newer equivalents of those GPUs, because NVIDIA has since wisened up, and is using the very capabilities you need for local LLMs as market segment differentiator.

I keep coming back to this: why do I need to run a local model on my own GPU? Open models can run in dedicated clouds and while, yeah, they may be more expensive per token than my own GPU, when accounting for depreciation, energy usage, and opportunity cost (money not spent on my GPU will instead sit in my portfolio appreciating with its particular blend of returns), I'm pretty sure I break even or even net lose money with a GPU.

Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to a fully local model in that, I can have agents looping 24/7 even when my internet is not working. But this is niche enough that if I had to price the advantages they don't seem worth it.

If I'm willing to pay the Openrouter tax, I can fire up Openrouter today and just get access to whatever model I want, and still pay a fraction for tokens as what I'm paying with the big guys.

My single 3080 runs so hot I don't need to warm my room in winter, and have to play games in my underwear in summer.

Unless you value privacy, pay for openrouter. You still get the benefits of cheap tokens and programmatic usage.

3090 pricing is something of a wild card. Since the only big-mem consume cards are the xx90s, and a 5090 is pushing $5000, resale value has gone way up. The bottom hit ~$700 last year. It's still a very good GPU, if power hungry.

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