Comment by amelius
4 hours ago
What if the AI companies start selling the hardware with their models?
I.e., you get a locked down device with access to their AI and maybe a way to run third party apps. Of course the developers of those apps will have to pay a percentage of their revenue.
Sound familiar?
More likely they would sell a chip with the model etched in silicon for the dramatically higher token/s.
A chip that can only be accessed through their software. With a monthly subscription fee, and other enshittification surprises.
Most likely those models would be extracted from the hardware in no time.
I suspect no, because most of the tokens would be used for its internal reasoning loop, and a cheaper model could be used to obfuscate the output.