“I fed a picture of donald duck to my computer and asked it to identify said duck. I then asked my computer to draw donald duck’s girlfriend in svg format on my shitty decade-old gtx 1080. It ran into an infinite loop since the number of polka dots kept exceeding its context window. So finally I decided to generate a textured 3D mesh from donald duck and it did so within 5 minutes without much error, then I approved for my computer to send it to my 3D printer”
This comment was not something I would have made 10 years ago, nor would have expected 5 years ago, even 3 years ago once LLM quantizatization largely enabled LLMs to be run locally on 8 gb of vram. Nor did I think it would have been a comment that I would have made 6 months ago. It’s not exactly surprising, except for how quickly I was dragged into it, within the past few months, with my limited resources.
If we split the comment into sentences associated with years that it became plausible for an enthusiast with unspecialized hardware:
“… decade-old gtx 1080 – 2016
“… asked my computer to identify said duck”1 – 2021
“… draw donald duck’s girlfriend in svg format1” – 2022
“… on my decade-old gtx 1080” – ~2023 - 2024
“… generate a textured 3D mesh from donald duck” – ~2023
“… within 5 minutes” – 2025
Try saying that in 2006, a decade before the gtx 1080 was released, just as PCs were tipping from 32-bit hardware to 64-bit.
We habitually declare computational niches dead far before they flourish to their full capabilities. We are now reviving decade-old hardware, extending their capabilities retroactively beyond what was imagined at their conception. The effect flows in both directions in the arrow of time – as compute capability increased, we observed software becoming less efficient at performing the same functions. The bi-directionality gives a stronger hint that there’s way more out there in computational space to reach extreme capability improvements over the same hardware.
So, could 32-bit machines have their own “GTX 1080” moment? Maybe there are only a few paradigm shifts left to push the revival period towards compute hardware capabilities through the 2000s.