There’s a telltale sign that never fails when times are truly about to change.
Do you remember installing Mortal Kombat on a 386 with two megabytes of RAM? Downloading a 250 KB card game over your first modem, holding your breath for minutes on end? Or opening photos on websites, waiting for the image to crawl all the way down the screen? Video? Nah, real time was impossible, let alone at the maximum quality our eyes can perceive 🙂
All of that created an insatiable hunger for resources, enough to justify the wildest fantasies—and some reactions that now seem ridiculous. “640 KB ought to be enough for anyone,” Bill Gates. Today, there’s hardware with up to 1.5 TB of memory per socket.
Well, without really noticing, we’ve just crossed that line again.
While we were busy debating whether AI was in a bubble, whether progress was stalling, or whether use cases were nothing but smoke and mirrors… something different appeared.
An agent. Call it Openclaw, though we’ll see every major player heading in the same direction.
No limits on resource consumption. No limits on its ability to operate. And it exploits the most ambitious context window any LLM can offer.
And this is where things truly spiral: the human context window is an entire lifetime. And yes—that’s what we’re going after.
Don’t fool yourselves. We run models in the cloud simply because we don’t yet have enough resources. But execution—and even training, learning, and improvement—we’ll want that to happen locally. Which only pushes the demand horizon even further.
All of this means that demand for computation and memory becomes, in practice, infinite (along with all associated resources, like energy). And that’s how the incentive emerges—the same one that has always driven major technological leaps: overwhelming demand in exchange for extraordinary results.
None of this is in doubt anymore for those who are deep in it. Anyone who has worked with agents knows it. Anyone who programs, writes, or designs knows it. The moment we could talk to machines, everything blew apart. Even I find it hard to believe—the dream has become real.
We won’t be the ones browsing the internet. We won’t be the ones creating, or even using, software. Who would have thought? The age of man doesn’t end with a machine rebellion, we’re simply handing over the baton.
This article is also available in Spanish here.
@luishg 