> Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers

Smart rich people, maybe. Have you got the money for extra RAM right now?

It's implied. Truly smart people manage to become affluent.

The legendary wealth of Paul Erdős was indeed largely of legend alone.

We've all what a terrible job LLMs do in some problems. But they are doing well at burning down Erdos's list of problems. Perhaps mathematicians aren't a good measure of "truly smart".

If you're seriously taking that angle on comparison .. how well are they doing on generating interesting and challenging Erdős like problems?

Oh, not that seriously, but it makes me wonder!

Why do you assume “truly smart people” care about affluence at all?

You've seen RAM slots go bad? DIMMs can also fail!

I'd much rather replace a bad stick than a whole motherboard/device.

For real. Reballing a chip is hard!

Not everyone lives in SanFra, my man, and can afford to throw a salary on a lab.

> Smart people always get the highest configuration in computers, unless they know they’ll never need some of the resources and can tolerate a lower option.

So if I'm buying a server and it's available with anything between 8GB and 4TB of RAM (the price difference being ~$70,000), and my current use only requires 8GB, how much should I get? There is a 50% chance the project fails and I never need more than 8GB and a 50% chance it succeeds and then I'll need 64GB or 512GB or 4TB depending on how well it goes.