Specifically with regard to AI, the consumers aren't even aware of the "grocery store" either. They're being served from a silver platter. What matters most is the quality of results, not the methods. You can disagree all you want for whatever (good and compelling) reasons, but it doesn't change the fact that many people do not even buy groceries now and doordash everything.

If it turns out that you can put a mobile kitchen in their backyard that cooks up everything without them realizing, it makes no difference to the consumer.

Realistically, yes there's a finite amount of training data, hence the plateau in capability we've seen for at least a year. I think we're likely to see a consolidation and compression of all of this into local models. The economics don't support the expected growth of the current arrangement either. There simply isn't that much distinct data out there as initially assumed.

My assumptions are that inference costs continue to decline (and/or the difficulty level of routing requests declines) and hardware acceleration continues into the future. These assumptions might be wrong, but that is the idea the thesis is based around.

(have built workflows and harnesses that currently target LLM provider APIs under the assumption I'll be able to point "locally-ish" eventually, my career had a strong focus on distributed computing about 10-15 years ago, think managing data and work clusters for LHC detector data processing, and I grew up on hobbyist distributed.net and BOINC projects, all the lenses I see this problem through; queues, jobs, sync vs async performance optimization, etc; recovered sysadmin|infra/devops engineer a lifetime ago)

Durable storage + sufficiently performant local LLM hardware + appropriate models [last two are wildcards and hard to predict the forward curve imho] = this experience locally. Remember when mobile video hardware acceleration wasn't good? And now, it is very good.