Will AI Force Us to Re-Learn Efficient Programming

The AI industry is an ouroboros. It promises software so cheap it might as well be free, but seemingly every AI project is yet another React app (because React features prominently in the training data), while the industry's demand for ever-more compute is driving RAM prices to unprecedented levels. It seems unlikely those prices will come back down.

The market is inundated with inefficient, RAM-hungry, AI slop apps while the very drive to use more AI makes RAM more expensive, which will increase the cost of cloud hosting and make it harder for consumers to afford sufficient hardware.

TANSTAAFL.

We as software engineers have gotten away with inefficient apps because consumer hardware has gotten both cheaper and more powerful. It looks like the music may soon stop. Then what?

I think it's time to re-learn how to write simple, efficient programs. Not everything needs React, maybe plain HTML will do. Maybe it's worth the time and effort of learning a lower-level language to ensure that app you want to write won't gobble up all of your users' memory.

We may be forced to re-learn efficiency, whether we want to or not.