The RAM Is Outside Time and Space

There is a fixed amount of RAM in the world. Not metaphorically fixed — literally. Every DIMM ever manufactured, every HBM stack on every accelerator, every shared L3 cache on every laptop CPU: it exists, it's physical, it's finite. You can add more by building more. But at any given moment, the total is what it is, and everything that needs to run is fighting for a slice of it.

AI took a lot of slices.

When a game engine can't afford the RAM it would have had two years ago, it's not because DRAM got expensive in the abstract. It's because there are hundreds of thousands of H100s sitting in data centers, each with 80GB of HBM2e, running matrix multiplications that will not benefit anyone's framerate today. The RAM is gone. It moved. It's doing something else.

The trade-off is temporal, which is a polite way of saying you suffer now and maybe benefit later. The training run finishes. The model deploys. Your computer uses the model. Except your computer did not get better RAM — it got access to a statistical function that lives somewhere else and answers questions over HTTP. The RAM is still not yours.

"Outside time and space" is actually the right framing. The compute that could have been in your tower is instead in a facility in Iowa, touching a gradient that will eventually compress into weights that will eventually run on servers that your laptop will eventually query over a network connection that has its own latency budget. None of this is local. None of this is now.

You are borrowing against a future where the model is good enough to compensate for the frame rate you're not getting today.

It might not be.