It looks like that’s not the case anymore. That’s what this is all about.

It still is. The DeepSeek R1 is 670B parameters, requiring more than 300GB of video ram (or unified memory), even if using 4-bit quantized models.

How much video RAM was needed for similar performance a year ago?

Roughly the same, as our collective goalposts have shifted, and are still shifting.

What was amazing output last year is today's slop.

NV is in no immediate danger; medium/long term, to anyone knowing what "75% gross margin" means it's no secret that there will be serious threats. You don't need DeepSeek for that particular realization.

Which open source model last January gave you similar results with the same amount of video ram?

Nomic Falcon, Mixtral, YALM, Bloom, Grok-1 and Jamba, just to name a few of the foundation models.

That only works until it's good enough that nobody cares about the difference.

That will only happen when we have AGI and at that point the world has much bigger problems.

This is definitely one view, but not sure I buy it at all.

History is littered with things that were made orders of magnitude better, people who claimed nobody would be happy until that happened, and then nobody writ large cared .

Tech in particular has a grand history of claiming we need to produce the technically best thing, but in practice, the market almost always chooses somewhere in the range of useful products, which is not the same at all - the technically best thing has rarely, if ever, become the market leader.