Comment by Herbstluft
2 days ago
I'd say the "threat" of local models and user independence is currently (successfully) being fought by cutting off the supply and development of general computing devices and hardware.
The mentioned big few are buying up everything regardless of need and making hardware unaffordable and unavailable for normal people (or smaller businesses). And some of the few manufacturers are already being convinced to stop developing/producing consumer hardware altogether.
And whats left might be taken care of via the rise of attestation. Just start framing local, unapproved models as "security risks" at some point.
Forcing people to go through you by buying up the market supply of a commodity at 10x the production cost is a strategy that will inevitably collapse. More DRAM will get made if prices hold.
In 10 years. 5 to realize the new prices are permanent and 5 more to build new fabs.
Most of the GPUs built in the past year are sitting in warehouses, just waiting for data centers to break ground and for electrical expansions to complete. And Nvidia can’t get China interested in buying their products in the Trump era.
There will be a massive glut of hardware soon enough. OpenAI needs $532billion in cashflow in the next 4 years to keep the “infinite money glitch” going. That’s not likely to happen unless AI makes some 10x value improvements for their customers in the next 1-2 years that we aren’t seeing now.