alt Hacker NewsThat's my fear, and unfortunately I think its likely to happen. I feel like we will settle down a little bit, but into a new higher "normal" baseline that still largely makes it unaffordable for most.
There's also still the risk of the creation of a new economic underclass, if both a) hardware remains too expensive for local inference and b) subscription or pay-per-token based inference also remains expensive or increases in price, then individuals will largely be locked out of the benefits that having access to AI could bring, leaving it purely in the hands of larger companies. People will only get to use and experience these tools through their employer, for the benefit of their employer.
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This is not correct. Prices will adjuts when the crash comes. At worst, the market and prices will just open peoples eyes up to the reality that 99% of the daily software we use, runs perfectly fine on a 5 years old computer.
The idea that you _must_ have 128 GB RAM and 1 TB ssd in your computer is juts absurd.
Remember... we reached the moon with the compute power of a pocket calculator, and there is no eternal law that says that everything has to be written in javascript.
> People will only get to use and experience these tools through their employer
Like in the era of mainframes, before the personal computer was a thing. I wonder if universities will play the same role, though.