Is it really here to stay? If the wheels fells off the investment train and ChatGPT etc. disappeared tomorrow, how many people would be running inference locally? I suspect most people either wouldn't meet the hardware requirements or would be too frustrated with the slow token generation to bother. My mom certainly wouldn't be talking to it anymore.

Remember that a year or two ago, people were saying something similar about NFTs —that they were the future of sharing content online and we should all get used to it. Now, they still might exist, it's true, but they're much less pervasive and annoying than they once were.