This is interesting to think about. There's so much competition among the frontier labs and from outside via open source it just doesn't seem obvious to me they could maintain elevated prices
On the internet you have 4 possible outcomes.
Say things are going to suck and they suck. You look brilliant.
Say things are going to suck, and they don't suck. Nobody cares because it doesn't suck.
Say things are going to be good, and they're good. A few attaboys for getting it right, but nobody cares.
Say things are going to be good, and they suck. You look like a moron.
Because of negativity bias everyone is leaning towards predicting DOOOOOOOOOOM. People aren't even consciously doing this, it's just a factor of the medium, because looking like a moron hurts way more than a few attaboys.
I think in about a year, we're going to see a scad of these ASICS like chat jimmy running year old models on dedicated hardware. Imagine racks and racks full of Astra but running at 15,000 tokens a second or whatever? Imagine swarms of them running the models we have today essentially for "free." That's where we're going to be. The bottleneck will be production, tbh, not demand.
"Hey Astra-Silicon, solve the Goldbach Conjecture!" Sure, it might take a few hours and be totally un-readable to a human being, but the 6m lines of Lean or whatever will be correct. Then what? What can we start doing then?
But yeah, doomerism is the dominant narrative of the day here right now. There's a sort of eschatological poisoning that's happening presently. Nobody can even seem to imagine a world where things get better. It's crazy. Maybe it's because I recently went through a major illness, maybe it's because I hit my head one-to-many times along the way? But I've never been more optimistic about the future than I am now.
That said bitcoin is still at like $80k per bitcoin though... so while it's not a good investment IMO (and I don't really mess around with crypto except for the time I got drunk and bought doge and made money), but there are people out there still using it. There's a bitcoin ATM less than a mile from my house.
Don't forget the criminals. When it comes to crypto, never forget the criminals.
It strikes me as similar to UPS / USPS / Fedex -- everyone uses the mail, and they mostly use whichever is cheapest for their requirements. I don't think there's much loyalty to specific services, and people are happy to switch between the options
I dont see a lot of love for weird memory like features on HN, but on provider subreddits its constantly talked about.