I see this liquid software being the unavoidable future. A computer that just does stuff in whatever way you guide it, in whatever way you like guiding it. The models will keep getting better and faster up to the point where everything is just happening in real time, no OS no drivers no programs, just an entity that can listen to you and can move around bits to accomplish whatever you are trying to do. Wanna post on HN? Any way that you can code such an action, the computer can just manifest it for you, on the fly, however you want it.
I guess there will be some economics or physics constraints of reevaluating everything all the time.
What a dystopian future where your computer use will be basically “metered” by the token. At least right now we don’t have to pay per mouse clicks.
I can't imagine it worse that the current hell hole of SaaS, which is basically a way to withhold ownership while forcing you to pay for unwanted feature bloat, unnecessary redesigns, and strict dictation of how you can use the software.
Excel '98 probably covers 90% of excel users needs, but here we are sending Microsoft billions a month to lease excel.
Local inference solves that.
We used to pay for phone calls not long ago. Now a video call is free.
This doesn’t make sense. You mentioned OS and drivers, why send the commands to your hardware through the black box and extra hoops instead of directly doing so?
Do you believe the average person can afford the 1TB+ VRAM required to run a competent model?
The expectation is of course that that will not be required. Competent models will become smaller and the compute to run them will become cheaper, once the market stabilizes. That will take some time of course.
Eventually yes. You can buy greeting cards today for $5 that have more compute power than the Eniac.
Not today. But just like the average person can now afford a smartphone which is more powerful than a workstation not long ago, we will have enough computing power for good enough local inference, at an accessible price.
We're not in the 2010s anymore, consumer hardware is actively regressing. Smartphones are actually a great example to bring up, because I believe 2026 was the first year in which smartphone hardware did not advance at all (and arguably declined) relative to price, due to AI-related shortages.
Nobody can predict the future, of course, but I personally believe this pattern will hold. A decade from now, the idea of a consumer being able to purchase a personal device with more than 8GB of RAM will be a thing of the past, all significant compute will be done in the cloud using the massive amounts of hardware being hoarded by corporations as we speak.
A decade from now, the idea of a consumer being able to purchase a personal device with more than 8GB of RAM will be a thing of the past
The only way this is remotely possible is if the copyright cartels get their way and make it illegal to have unlicensed local compute. Assuming that doesn't happen, I'd gladly bet a large amount that computing will be much more affordable 10 years from now.
I think one of two things is more likely: either at some point the bottom falls out on the $1T/year datacenter capex we have today, or it doesn’t and eventually supply will enormously expand as new fabs being planned today eventually come online.
Yes because the models will be etched straight into silicon.