Its pretty clear that there are significant limitations on who has access to the compute needed to drive LLM based scientific research.
Yes, not everyone will be able to launch a swarm of agents and a few billion tokens, but scientific research has always had areas where the most advanced tools were beyond the reach of every scientist who might like to have access.
What's different this time is that this situation is expanding to almost every field.
The mechanism through which this occurs being..?
The only reason computers are so expensive is that demand is so out of control.
Even if that doesn't happen, a lot of non AI companies like Oracle that invested too much on data centers will fail and have to sell their hardware. Big models are getting too expensive for a lot of smaller businesses so demand migrates to less GPU hungry ones. That means Oracle might be left with excess capacity.
And we also get more supply because high margins attract investment. 7 years is a realistic time frame to build new DRAM fabs and packaging, it might take even less if governments treat it as a security issue.
I'm all for the idea that AI capabilities can be democratized and help ordinary scientists outside of a handful of labs. But it seems there would need to be some checks against Big Tech and it won't happen by just letting the free market do its thing.