It sounds like you're focusing on the problems of running local models, or running models yourself, but I don't think that many people seriously expect near term improvement on that, it's definitely more just hopeful thinking there. That's not what I meant to address, and I also am in more of a "wait and see" mode.

But at this point we do expect that open weights _hosted_ options become feasible for the tasks they're using the frontier models for. And because of the lack of "legal monopoly" (intellectual property of whatever kind), they're way cheaper, not mention more flexible.

The launch of the tinker platform from Thinking Machines is an example of the "more flexibility" part that people want (and they chose to make their model open weights, maybe because this is the angle they want to push).

At this point I think it's realistic enough that the ball is in OpenAI / Anthropic's court to figure out how to respond to this threat to their business model.

That said, I think it's concerning that there are apparently only a couple of providers of hosted open weights inference, due to the complexities of doing so (per Dax from OpenCode's tweets).