The Personal Computer revolution was made possible by economies of scale in industrial manufacturing of relatively simple components. Companies made money by selling widgets to as many people as possible.
By definition, AI is only made possible by advances in massive computation capacity, which is easier to achieve and improve with centralized models. This is always going to be the realm of Big Money.
In a way, AI epitomizes the shift from XX-century economics, based on manufacturing, to a XXI-century version based on extracting rent from networked digital subjects.
> By definition, AI is only made possible by advances in massive computation capacity
By what? In the words of Inigo Montoya: "The way you use that word... I do not think it means what you think it means."
Sure, we're kinda-brute-forcing things now, but that's no physical law (nor dictionary definition) declaring that digital assistants will be just captive pen-pal lamp-genies of Big Companies inside their Big Computer Rooms forever.
Perhaps someday you'll be able to grab an off-the-shelf AI core, "flash" its mutable-circuits/firmware/weights with a starting state, and pop it into an appropriate chassis for the task.
It will still be inferior to what Big Money will be able to serve, in a field where each marginal gain makes a massive qualitative difference.
AI is a buzzword for "tons of clever statistical software running hot to mimic (the output of) our complex brain processes". Big Money will always do that sort of thing better than the Taiwanese, and there is absolutely no incentive to turn a rent-extracting networked service into a widget-selling proposition, even once the field stops progressing at the current pace. Everything is now networked, so everything can access what will always essentially be "Brain as a Service" (BaaS, surely someone coined this already...).
Will we see specialized-hardware AI tuned for this or that task? Probably. Will we have portable configurable AIs? Possibly. Will either of them be as good as Big Money models, which can continuously feed on subscriptions and web-scraping at massive scale? Very, very unlikely imho.
Why would they sell you a solution when they can rent you one forever? Why acquiesce to the logic of physical laws when the laws of economics say "$$$$$!!!"?
The Personal Computer revolution was made possible by economies of scale in industrial manufacturing of relatively simple components. Companies made money by selling widgets to as many people as possible.
By definition, AI is only made possible by advances in massive computation capacity, which is easier to achieve and improve with centralized models. This is always going to be the realm of Big Money.
In a way, AI epitomizes the shift from XX-century economics, based on manufacturing, to a XXI-century version based on extracting rent from networked digital subjects.