They’re just making excuses for the fact that no one can work out how to make money with AI except to sell access to it in the vague hope that somebody else can figure something useful to do with it and will therefore pay for access.

I can run an AI locally on expensive but still consumer level hardware. Electricity isn’t very expensive so I think their biggest problem is simply their insistence on keeping everything centralised. If they simply sold the models people could run them locally and they could push the burden of processing costs onto their customers, but they’re still obsessed with this attitude that they need to gather all the data in order to be profitable.

Personally I hope we either run into AGI pretty soon or give up on this AI thing. In either situation we will finally stop talking about it all the time.