Is there any (near future) technology that would permit burning this terrabyte into some kind of ROM chip?
Yes, from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48986351
Given how fast models are improving, burning the weights into actual ROM is prohibitively expensive if you need (or want) to replace the chip every couple of months.
The alternative is on-TPU flash for storing the weights.
Yes. We're still a ways off from this being ubiquitous, but I am convinced it's coming.
The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086181
You can still try it at https://chatjimmy.ai/, but it's running the rather outdated Llama 3.1 8B