Are you a little dismayed by the monster that is the generative AI industry, swallowing billions in investment dollars and making consumer computing borderline unaffordable for everyday people? Do you not have $5,000 to shell out for a new graphics card so you can run increasingly unoptimized games?
NVIDIA has a solution for you: buy last-gen hardware. According to hongxing2020, an NVIDIA insider with a proven track record of predicting the company’s drops, the RTX 3060 — a five-year-old GPU that currently goes for about $300 secondhand — will be brought back into production for consumers so all the top-shelf stuff can be fed into the AI money pit. Sorry, kid, that 5090 you wanted is powering ChatGPT now.
If nothing else, the fact that this is even a possibility should indicate just how dire the state of PC hardware is at the moment — five years may not sound like much, but in the fast-moving tech industry, it may as well be an eternity. The fact that NVIDIA would rather throw consumers scraps than stop to consider, even for a single moment, that going all-in on AI may not be the best idea, is galling. Like any company, though, they’re going where the money is, and the money certainly isn’t in the hands of the American public at the moment.
Will no one think of the profits generative AI was supposed to generate? /s