It's unclear it's a dead-end within 5 years.
There's still several orders of magnitude of improvement that are almost certainly left - it's just not clear how much is left on the frontier end.
Most people will be very glad to pay Anthropic, OpenAI, Google etc $200 a month to get things done 20x faster than they could IF they had a $8000 MacBook and could theoretically do it locally.
Some people would pay $200 a month forever not to have to open the terminal one time...
"Doing things X times faster" at some point hits Amdahl law. If just context switching takes 5 minutes, speeding up a 1 hour task by 10x provides 5x improvement.
Furthermore, if looking at the results takes 10 minutes, that same 1 hour task only sees a 3x improvement. And so on.
That’s not how firms do the financial analysis which is where most of the revenue’s are coming from…
> Most people will be very glad to pay Anthropic, OpenAI, Google etc $200 a month to get things done 20x faster than they could IF they had a $8000 MacBook and could theoretically do it locally.
No most people will not pay $200 for an LLM subscription. Some software developers do. Also, at $200/month, you are much better getting the macbook machine assuming token output speed is the same or at least reasonable.
LLMs are not very productive for your average person now for them to drop $200 on. They'll need to be more capable and integrated and even so...
One thing to remember is that the $200/month subscription is heavily subsidized. It is more to promote use, especially to corporate users that pay for the API token use.