LOL, that's so much worse than I imagined.
I know we want to turn everything into a rental economy aka the financialization of everything, but this is just super silly.
I hope we're 2-3 years away, at most, from fully open source and open weights models that can run on hardware you can buy with $2000 and that can complete most things Opus 4.5 can do today, even if slower or that needs a bit more handholding.
> hardware you can buy with $2000
Including how much RAM?
Only a few memory suppliers remain, after years of competition, and they have intentionally reduced NAND wafer supply to achieve record profits and stock prices, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46467946
In theory, China could catch up on memory manufacturing and break the OMEC oligopoly, but they could also pursue high profits and stock prices, if they accept global shrinkage of PC and mobile device supply chains (e.g. Xiaomi pivoted to EVs), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46415338#46419776 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482777#46483079
AI-enabled wearables (watch, glass, headphones, pen, pendant) seek to replace mobile phones for a subset of consumer computing. Under normal circumstances, that would be unlikely. But high memory prices may make wearables and ambient computing more "competitive" with personal computing.
One way to outlast siege tactics would be for "old" personal computers to become more valuable than "new" non-personal gadgets, so that ambient computers never achieve mass consumer scale, or the price deflation that powered PC and mobile revolutions.
OpenAI, a while back said their was no moat. You'll see these AI companies panic more desperately as they all realize it's true.