If LLM's reach their potential we're speaking of access to generalizable high quality cognitive labor for something approaching $0, for everybody.
Quanted out Qwen 3.8 models are not frontier level. Have you used them for real work? They suck. They are so unsure of themselves due to the quant-lobotomy. They just endlessly loop in thinking even when they have the right decision and then output it when they get to the thinking cap. They score close in benchmarks because most benchmarks don't measure time to complete a task.
I use Qwen quants in production for fast inference but I disable thinking and have them fine tuned for the task. My realtime transcription + translation stack right now is running 5 streams at 380 tok/s.
Running DeepSeek 4.1 Flash at FP4 is going to need at least a 10-15k machine. I'd consider that near frontier level.
The price will never be zero, since there is a finite amount of compute possible.
There is zero reason to believe we're barrelling toward utopia and plenty of examples that illustrate exactly where we are headed.
I misspoke when I said "zero". I should have said "down to marginal cost". It's fine for AI to be priced at the cost of its compute! That's the efficient outcome.
What reason do you expect to provide a moat for a monopoly? Training on existing customer interactions? That might get you an oligopoly, but there are already two serious competitors in the US alone and several potential Chinese rivals.