This is the worst form of AI there will ever be, it will only get better. So traditional self-learning might be completely useless if it really gets much better
I wanted to highlight this assumption, because that's what it is, not a statement of truth.
For one, it doesn't really look like the current techniques we have for AI will scale to the "much better" you're talking about -- we're hitting a lot of limits where just throwing more money at the same algorithms isn't producing the giant leaps we've seen in the past.
But also, it may just end up that AI provider companies aren't infinite growth companies, and once companies aren't able to print their own free money (stock) based on the idea of future growth, and they have to tighten their purse strings and start charging what it actually costs them, the models we'll have realistic, affordable access to will actually DECREASE.
I'm pretty sure the old fashioned, meat-based learning model is going to remain price competitive for a good long while.
Perhaps some rare open source rebels will hold the line, and perhaps it'll be legal to buy the hardware to run them, and maybe the community will manage to keep up with feature parity with the commercial models, and maybe enough work can be done to ensure some concept of integrity in the training data, especially if some future advance happens to reduce the need for training data. It's not impossible, but it's not a sure thing, either.
In the super long run this could even grow into the major problem that AIs have, but based on how slow humanity in general has been to pick up on this problem in other existing systems, I wouldn't even hazard a guess as to how long it will take to become a significant economic force.
I wanted to draw attention to Moore's Law and the supercomputer in your pocket (some of them even ship with on-board inference hardware). I hear you that the newest hottest thing will always require lighting VC money on fire but even today I believe one could leverage the spot (aka preemptable) market to run some pretty beefy inference without going broke
Unless I perhaps misunderstood the thrust of your comment and you were actually drawing attention to the infrastructure required to replicate Meta's "download all the web, and every book, magazine, and newspaper to train upon petabytes of text"
So yeah, the current AI companies are making it very difficult for public alternatives to emerge.
None of this includes hardware optimizations either, which lags software advances by years.
We need 2-3 years of plateauing to really say intelligence growth is exhausted, we have just been so inundated with rapid advance that small gaps seem like the party ending.
"This is the worst form of web there will ever be; it will only get better."
I for one can't wait to be force fed ads with every answer.
It's a bit similar with the brain, learning and AI use. Except when it comes to gaining and applying knowledge, the muscle that is trained is judgement.