| Norion said: You realize that local AI models exist right? The technology is a much broader subject than just what big AI companies are doing. Also it's a silly statement since technological advancement improved living standards drastically the previous century so AI and robotics doing the same in this one is expected. For example robots helping care for the elderly and disabled is a huge positive development that's gonna happen in the coming decades. |
Heck, even without talking about company-trained local models, many relatively small institutions can train or fine-tune large-ish video-language-reasoning models. The IT department for the city of Rio De Janeiro distilled their own LLM recently, for example. That's an entity with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, not billions.
Video-Language Models are famously hard to build a moat around. That's one of the risks to the profitability of the SOTA AI model-development companies, and why they have pivoted toward selling the services around the models as their competitive edge rather than the models themselves.
If I were to guess, AI model providers are going to be at-cost/near-cost utility companies in the next decade, akin to public ISPs, and similar to the original vision of Open AI of a "capped profit" model. They'll sustain their revenue from larger companies that depend on their existence as complements, with maybe some advertisements as a revenue diversifier, and of course use-fees. The hardware-side of things will become more efficient with ASICs, photonics, etc. More public institutions, like the Rio De Janeiro example, but also public labs and universities, will also expand.
Like with most new technologies, costs remain high with the initial discovery, and then come down rapidly. I think many people are suspicious because social media organizations and search engines concentrated because the network effects incentivized that, but DL models don't have that same dynamic. They don't become more valuable as their user-base expands.
Last edited by sc94597 - on 17 June 2026
