Jevons Paradox states that as a technology becomes more and more efficient lowering the production cost, its consumption tends to increase rather than decrease. In the case of compute resources, it historically increased but in a very relentless manner.
As RAM chips and processors started becoming super-cheap since the 1990-00s era, somewhere down the line technology firms started this abhorrent practice of 'taking compute resources for granted' or stated another way - sacrificing programming efficiency to prioritize developer productivity/time.
What Altman recently said about consumer smartphones and laptops 'wasting' compute resources is a criticism that also finds its way towards these bloatware and cruft creators of the past two decades. To some extent, it also finds its way to the overwhelming marketing and PR that convinces a smartphone buyer to go for 16GB RAM even when 4GB suffices for their daily tasks.
Despite all the gloom surrounding this present silicon crunch, if there is one good which can come out of this situation it's this - there is a tiny ray of hope that compute resources will no longer be taken for granted and these bloatware creators in large tech firms will once again be forced to write more efficient and leaner software.
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50326907
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