You're confusing AI with OpenAI.

They, anthropic, others, are constantly pushing and over-extending, but theyve already long since by passed models that are useful for various tasks. Certainly not everything, but if the big players died tomorrow you could run a local model on a gaming GPU that would still do decent amounts of work if you were the kind of person who had a use for it.

Not everyone is, and thats ok.

I find chatgpt very useful for work, but id be cool with them failing and having to downgrade. Models already did what I needed well enough a year ago, maybe a bit more.

I mean, if every "AI" company went belly-up tomorrow, if development of any new model was banned globally, no exceptions... it would still not go away.

Deepseek 4.1-tier models would be useful for decades, and cheap to run. Heck, I think the scaffolding around them still needs years of development to not be so half-baked.

It was expensive, sure. But not entirely nonviable across the board like we see today with AI. It’s not even close.

Those “Big companies that could afford to negotiate Bandwidth prices” don’t even exist in the AI context of today. They’re still speculative. If the bubble pops before that speculative future comes to fruition, the development of the technology towards that end stops.