Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" theory, which you may know from its smash hit "trickle down economics"! Surely this time it'll be different, right?
While trickle down theory is dubious when it comes to economics, it's clear that it is valid when it comes to technology. Tech trickles down.
Unless we are really going to hit the Singularity and create Godlike superintelligence that improves beyond all limits, sooner or later the models will stop improving, no matter how much compute we throw at them. After that happens, the best models will be etched into model-specific ASICs with weights fixed in mask ROM (like Taalas is already doing), which will result in massive, order of magnitude inference efficiency increase. Couple this with the training datacenters suddenly becoming available for inference, and the cost of compute will plummet.
Yes, it might take a few years, but the hardware will be cheap again. And if the result of the whole process is human-level AI, then it will be worth it in the end.
This is empirically false when it comes to technology.
A few years of technological inflation (with a very specific cause) do not invalidate a hundred years of technological deflation.
This has been studied somewhat extensively (https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/20/2/539/6500315?login=... is one example), and it’s been shown over and over that this does in fact not work and leads to larger wealth disparity, across many countries where it has been attempted.
It’s possible you’re working off some other definition of the term based on your comment but that’s the generally accepted usage.
It would be neat if someone did sweeping sentiment analysis on them, just to see it graphed, but I’m sure gathering the data would be prohibited.