Re: While I'm very skeptical of the AI hype compared to the reality
Whenever I've run models, which admittedly is not often, it writes to memory a lot. It loads a lot of assets into memory, runs conversions on them, and then thrashes the RAM for a while. That's fine when it's RAM it's using, but not so much if it's flash. I agree with you that people don't tend to wear that out now, but that could easily change if that's what the software is doing.
It's not entirely new, either. Some Android phone manufacturers have started advertising massive amounts of RAM, for example 24 GB, which consists of a moderate 8 GB of real RAM, and then 16 GB of swap. There have been some reports of this causing flash-related failures, but that is much more limited use than running a model actively in it, since the swap space isn't constantly being loaded and rewritten. Just because it isn't a problem now doesn't mean it will never be one, especially if we change the reasons why it's not been a problem now.