AI: The Rise of the Machines... Or Just a Lot of Overhyped Chatbots?

dragonbr said:

Forgot to mention, I only chose unreal because its all I really know about. After joining the emu discord yesterday I saw that there were people debating this very subject.

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Cool.

I used to work in Unity, the last 6 years I've been using Unreal Engine. It's really good but the last 2 years of UE5 development have been a bit of a disappointment. I'm wondering if UE6 is going to die under its own weight and get outworked by Godot.

Rabbit_Games said:

He spent over $10k to make that? I need more disposable income.

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Going to be sad when everyone has potential access to the tools to make the exact game they want but cant afford that and/or the hardware to play it on. Makes me wonder if we're going to see computer ownership, at least for gaming, go back to a niche community and most consumer usage is just everything being streamed from data centers and you have a subscription to geforce now.

Janx said:

Going to be sad when everyone has potential access to the tools to make the exact game they want but cant afford that and/or the hardware to play it on. Makes me wonder if we're going to see computer ownership, at least for gaming, go back to a niche community and most consumer usage is just everything being streamed from data centers and you have a subscription to geforce now.

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I have a few things to do local AI and my experience with it hasn't been great. I much prefer my cloud AI subs to my LMStudio Qwen3.8 for anything. I didn't realize how limited local AI was; it either knows or it doesn't, and doesn't search for anything. Mine wouldn't update, look on the web, etc. It was completely offline. I know that you can connect them but I already have a bunch of cloud subs that are fully connected. For some people, this is a feature not a drawback; for my use cases, it doesn't make sense. It's something I will come back to when I have spare cycles.

We'll see if this is a bump in the road price-wise, much like the GPU storms, or something more sustained. I don't think we are returning to the prices of the 80's-early 90's, when PCs were super niche. The AI Bubble may or may not POP per se but I think the spending will lessen and this hardware will have to go somewhere, and when people are buying rather than companies, the hardware corps aren't going to try to translate $7000 shortage pricing AI laptops into 2030 machines. There isn't the demand when companies aren't buying; regular consumers will pay +500-+$1000; no one is just going accept the $1500 desktop has become a $4000 desktop. The market will shrink enough and someone will start finding a way to start giving people want they want.

Obviously YMMV:

Rabbit_Games said:

We are quickly moving to a future where you will be essentially walking around with a logon device. Every program/app will be run from "The Cloud". No more installs, etc... just you putting the shortcuts to your favorite Apps on your "Desktop" and then click to use.

And with Starlink being so successful, you'll be able to access everything from literally anywhere on Earth. No more cell towers, etc... we'll all be walking around with Sat phones keeping us "Connected" (See: Tracked) 24/7.

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I mean, yeeeeeeees potentially, maybe but not for a while. I mean, that's not Flying cars THE FUTURE™ but its still the future, as in decade(s) away. What is the paradigm that gets us there? What use case makes people give up desktops/ipads/laptops/phones? One of the great (and terrible) but truly consistent things about people is that regardless of time, technology or circumstances, they remain people, and those same forces that have driven us since we walked out of the Garden: wariness, pride, envy, lust, jealousy, etc. drive us still. The idea of putting our stuff on our box that we control is going to to go away slowly, if at all.

Rabbit_Games said:

We are quickly moving to a future where you will be essentially walking around with a logon device. Every program/app will be run from "The Cloud". No more installs, etc... just you putting the shortcuts to your favorite Apps on your "Desktop" and then click to use.

And with Starlink being so successful, you'll be able to access everything from literally anywhere on Earth. No more cell towers, etc... we'll all be walking around with Sat phones keeping us "Connected" (See: Tracked) 24/7.

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I dispute this, because "edge based computing" is improving with Moore's law along with all the improvements to cloud-based computing. Even my phone which is generally built to have constant wirelss communication has much more utility when it works without service. Starlink, which accomplishes low latency through low earth orbit altitudes, loses 30-60 satellites a month to provide that. Starlink exists but is going to be difficult to scale, so cell-towers are here to stay.

Since this is the AI thread, I think people in the future may be even more interested in offline capabilities as AI continues to pollute the internet. Localized AI will also become more trusted and economic as upload datastreams will become higher bandwidth due to video datastreams. The difference between streaming raw video to the cloud vs locally processing and then streaming the resulting output might seem minor, but has significant impacts from a computation, transfer and maintenance perspective that differentiate that paradigm from the device being a "logon device".

Control said:

Are you sure there's going to be stuff at all? Most people will follow the path of least resistance, adapt, and never consider that there could be an alternative. How many people stream every single thing they watch now? Normal people don't buy physical media any more or download videos or even music anymore. How much software has gone to subscription services instead of being a thing you own? Games are probably as close as most people will get now, but even they come from Steam (which is only one heart attack away from becoming Super-EA).

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OK, so after a long, slow decline (more than two decades), many people switched over to software distribution. Where has that same tendency been exhibited in the hardware space? A ton of players have spent BILLIONS trying to convince people they didn't need to spend money on hardware, that they could have a similar or better experience, Geforce Now!, etc and all have fallen by the wayside. I am not saying it won't happen but that is just for gaming; What about your documents? Sure, its great to backup things on the cloud but who doesn't also want to store things locally?

Your argument, if you recall, was for a breaking of the current paradigm, "walking around with a logon device" i.e. no more desktop/laptop etc. I mean, maybe? But they are getting tons of pushback about building datacenters for AI now, and you think people will accept hyperscalers putting ALL Compute in the "The Cloud™"? Again, its not flying cars time-scale but its decades, not in the singular, for anything like that to transpire, IMO. It feels kind of Johnny Mnemonic to me, when we thought that VR was going to rule everything, until people realized wearing a mask all the time to do anything sucked.


I liked motion controllers and dance pads. That was a great era of gaming! Xbox 360/PS2/Wii! But then in a sudden licensing flash, the whole rhythm/music controller game phenomenon died out and motion controllers had run their course. The Beat Saber goes on, though.