> First trend: Moore’s Law, or rather, its lack thereof. Despite all the efforts of Apple to hide its flattening curve with ARM-based chips, it is vox populi th

> First trend: Moore’s Law, or rather, its lack thereof. Despite all the efforts of Apple to hide its flattening curve with ARM-based chips, it is vox populi that a computer from 2014 is just about as powerful as the one you bought as a Christmas gift in 2023, bar the amount of RAM or the speed and capacity of the SSDs therein. On the other hand, consumer PCs of 2014 were, by all standards, widely superior to those of 2004, and immensely more than those of 1994 and, needless to say, 1984. Generative AI and local LLMs have really changed this. It is an amazing capability to be able to run Stable Diffusion and LLMs like Mistral in the privacy and control of your own hardware. Despite whatever assurances OpenAI may give you about the privacy of your data, you are not in control. They already deem certain prompts problematic. How long before they forward problematic prompts to law enforcement? Also, how safe is your IP? We already know that LLMs can reproduce some of their training material verbatim. Do you want your source code to be able to be reproduced like that? The latest consumer hardware is able to run a lot of these models at acceptable performance. I think that demand for that might drive at least some people upgrading or else getting a more powerful computer and/or GPU.