Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate
Models on local hardware that give adequate performance and the availability of non-US models mean that path is doomed to failure. If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere. While they might not get frontier-level performance out of the alternatives, there's plenty of stuff out there that's good enough for 1/4 to 1/10th of the cost. Or just the cost of power, if you're willing to pay for some hardware and are operating on a small scale.
The only play the AI companies have got now is twofold :
- Regulatory capture, hence all the press releases of basic and frankly embarrassing sandbox failures and "we need to slow down" talk to try and get that rolling, and
- Banning of those nasty, evil, non-US models in the name of national security.
And then what? The rest of the world will just move on to the next most useful thing on the list. There will be ~330 million US citizens to extract wealth out of, to service trillions in data centre debt. That shit's not gonna fly.