Local AI"AI under your desk instead of a data center": BBC's AI Decoded hits 540K views, and commenters blame a "RAM cartel" for the $40K price tag

A BBC News AI Decoded episode on Apple and Meta backing powerful AI models that run on desktop machines instead of the cloud has passed 540,000 views. It went up Oct 24 under the title "The end of data centres?"

Host Marc Cieslak talks with consumer tech specialist Ben Hatton and AI safety researcher and author Nate Soares about whether Apple's hardware and Meta's open-weight strategy could shift computing, as communities push back on data centers' energy, water and land use. Meta said on Oct 15 that its 800B+ parameter Muse Spark Open runs on two Apple Mac Studios.

The top comment, with 178 likes: "The government needs to start breaking up monopolies again." Others: "I prefer uncensored and full control running locally" (65), and "99% of consumers just need average model but it needs to be cheap, OpenAI and Anthropic will be Ferrari" (39). On the $40,000 hardware mentioned in the episode, one commenter wrote that "the Ram cartels are the only reason," noting 1TB of RAM cost $3,500 in 2025 (34 likes).