I think it will go in the opposite direction. Very massive closed-weight models that are truly miraculous and magical. But that would be sad because of all the prompt pre-processing that will prevent you from doing much of what you'd really want to do with such an intelligent machine.
I expect it to eventually be a duopoly like android and iOS. At world scale, it might divide us in a way that politics and nationalities never did. Humans will fall into one of two AI tribes.
Except that we've seen that bigger models don't really scale in accuracy/intelligence well, just look at GPT4.5. Intelligence scales logarithmically with parameter count, the extra parameters are mostly good for baking in more knowledge so you don't need to RAG everything.
Additionally, you can use reasoning model thinking with non-reasoning models to improve output, so I wouldn't be surprised if the common pattern was routing hard queries to reasoning models to solve at a high level, then routing the solution plan to a smaller on device model for faster inference.
Exactly. If some company ever does come up with an AI that is truly miraculous and magical the very last thing they'll do is let people like you and me play with it at any price. At best, we'd get some locked down and crippled interface to heavily monitored pre-approved/censored output. My guess is that the miracle isn't going to happen.
If I'm wrong though and some digital alchemy finally manages to turn our facebook comments into a super-intelligence we'll only have a few years of an increasingly hellish dystopia before the machines do the smart thing and humanity gets what we deserve.
I expect it to eventually be a duopoly like android and iOS. At world scale, it might divide us in a way that politics and nationalities never did. Humans will fall into one of two AI tribes.