Just so that I have your position straight: you actually believe that over the long term, like 10, 20 years, that the amount of RAM in a laptop is going to go down?
It's not out of the realm of possibility, but I just want to make you aware that this would be a very surprising development in computing history.
This seems to be a different discussion than was going on up thread about:
> in the next few years a "good enough" model will run on entry-level hardware
Exactly. In the next few years, entry-level hardware will not be advancing beyond 16GB. And anything beyond 32GB will remain decidedly high-end.
And that's for laptops with unified memory. In the desktop space, 8GB discrete GPUs are going to be sticking around for a very long time.
A future with less RAM is possible with more applications using computational storage with ssd/nvme.
But that's not my main argument is that its delusional for OP thinks its reasonable to expect that soon we'll be able to run models on consumer hardware that will be able to build basically most things,
But I do think there will be many compromises made for consumer electronics, I don't think the powers that be are eager to give consumers all the best memory (that should be clear by now) There's 3 DDR5 DRAM manufactures in the world that have to provide memory to all the world's militaries, governments, datacenters/corporations. Consumers are last priority.