Comment by JohnBooty

    guess you are arguing that the models _now_ will 
    be durably useful enough to commit the time to 
    creating the ASIC?

Objectively, the current frontier-ish models will be useful for some time. Imagine the zombie apocolypse hits, recedes, and you need to rebuild society. An offline copy of Fable or even Opus would be a nice thing to have.

Subjectively, it's hard to say if people will pay for "a model from 18 months ago, but REALLY FAST AND CHEAP"

The speed difference suggests some use cases that might narrow the performance gap. With a > 50x performance delta you have some headroom to play with.

You can do many many fast iterations of ye olde "Ralph loops." You can also jack up the reasoning/effort level. And you could probably do some combination of both, while still running really fast ie 10x the number of iterations at 2x reasoning/effort.

So I think a hypothetical "50x faster Opus 4.8, but burned into ASICs" could be pretty competitive against the frontier models from 2027, 2028, 2029, and maybe beyond?