This gives me hope that when the subsidization circus ends and everyone is on pure usage then it won't be entirely exclusionary to mere mortals who don't have $200pm budgets.
* As you’ve noted, people keep finding ways of slamming more intelligence into smaller models, meaning that a given hardware spec delivers more model capability over time.
* Hardware will continue to improve and supply will catch up to demand, meaning that a dollar will deliver more hardware spec over time.
I hope that one day we’ll look back on the current model of “accessing AI through provider APIs” the same way we now look back on “everyone connecting to the company mainframe.”
So much of what I ask codex to do doesn’t require full GPT 5 intelligence, and if 75% of the tokens were generated locally that’d save a massive amount of cost.
High end SOTA coding is harder, but even there I suspect a mix of usage based strong models and selfhost small is viable if necessary.
Of course, this is fine for people in the bay area earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But then your client base becomes so reduced its hard to justify the valuation these companies have.
These AI companies are not hyped so much because they will offer a luxury product, they're valued because they're supposed to "change the world" which luxury does not do.