Right now China is flexing the future in my opinion. Smaller, widely available, frontier models for pennies on the dollar.

I think the future of ai will be breakthroughs that let it run on commodity hardware, and the average person will not be paying for it from the cloud unless they want to be surveilled or are stuck on older hardware.

Right now I am running about what was a frontier model 1-2 years ago on a junk machine. Some people are running what was a frontier model 4 months ago on PCs and laptops that cost 5,000. In a year I think the landscape will be even better.