[SturgeonsLaw]

I'm sure the people placing multibillion dollar bets have done their research, but the trends I see are AI getting more efficient and hardware getting more powerful, so as time goes on, it'll be more and more viable to run AI locally.

Even with token consumption increasing as AI abilities increase, there will be a point where AI output is good enough for most people.

Granted, people are very willing to hand over their data and often money to rent a software licence from the big players, but if they're all charging subscription fees where a local LLM costs nothing, that might cause a few sleepless nights for a few execs.

[impure-aqua]

We could potentially see one-time-purchase model checkpoints, where users pay to get a particular version for offline use, and future development is gated behind paying again- but certainly the issue of “some level of AI is good enough for most users” might hurt the infinite growth dreams of VCs

[meltyness]

tts would be an interesting case-study. it hasn't really been in the lime-light, so could serve as a leading indicator for what will happen when attention to text generation inevitably wanes

I use Read Aloud across a few browser platforms cause sometimes I don't care to read an article I have some passing interest in.

The landscape is a mess:

it's not really bandwidth efficient to transmit on one count, local frameworks like Piper perform well in alot of cases, there's paid APIs from the big players, at least one player has incorporated api-powered neural tts and packaged it into their browser presumably ad-supported or something, yet another has incorporated into their OS, already (though it defaults to speak and spell for god knows why). I'm not willing to pay $0.20 per page though, after experimenting, especially when the free/private solution is good enough.