[topherhunt]

AFAICT this isn't how SOTA has worked, ever, since the term was invented. So far (again AFAICT) it's always been: Centralized highly-resourced nodes can deliver more technically impressive results, whereas cheaper lower-resource consumer hardware continually lags it. Your premise that "SOTA has a plateau" needs data; you're giving me some juicy plausible hypotheses about reasons why advances might hit a wall, but technology advances tend to find ways around those walls, do you disagree?

The history of computing is full of predictions that consumer hardware would catch up to server-class capability in X years, and the answer has consistently been, consumer hardware catches up to _yesterday's_ server capability while server capability has moved on to new more mind-blowing paradigms which would not be possible on consumer hardware for another half-decade or more.

I'm sure that specific scaling trajectories will hit specific ceilings, such that in specific ways, one can make the argument that (for example) today's iphone performs at parity with today's servers. In 5 minutes I can spin up the same Postgres or Mongo DB that the largest companies on earth use server-side, though I can't support anywhere near the same data & traffic volume. But parity along specific technical aspects is a very different matter from the broad prediction of "you won't need a server for SOTA".

To step back to the bigger context -- your original point seems more along the lines of "we're obviously in an unsustainable bubble, and the rapid progress in on-device AI will further exacerbate the embarrassing collapse of all these overhyped AI companies". I strongly agree with you. But I think that's likely _and also_ firmly predict that the technical SOTA of 2031 (and 2041, if we make it there), in nearly every imaginable aspect including language-capable AI, will be vastly more capable than what you can run in your pocket.