[waboremo]

The bleeding edge will always be in that territory. It still requires a massive investment today to run AI applications locally to produce anywhere near as good results. People are spending upwards of $2000 for a GPU just to get decent results when it comes to image generation, many forgoing this entirely and just giving Google a monthly fee to use their hardware.

Which is the point, decentralization will always be playing catch up here unless something really interesting happens. It has absolutely nothing to do with local compute power, that has always been on an incline. We just get fed scraps down the line.

[jacquesm]

Todays scraps are yesterdays state-of-the-art, and that's very logical and applies to far more than just AI applications. It's the way research and development result in products and the subsequent optimization. This has been true since the dawn of time in one form or another. At some point stone tools were high tech and next to affordably. Then it was bronze, then iron, and at some point we finally hit steam power. From there to the industrial revolution was a relatively short span and from there to electricity, electronics, solid state, computers, personal computers, mobile phones, smartphones and so on in ever decreasing steps.

If anything the steps are now so closely following each other that we have far more trouble tracking the societal changes and dealing with them than that we have a problem with the lag between technological advancement and its eventual commoditization.