I mean, there's an "enormous incentive" for people to run their own data centers rather than using AWS. And yet, cloud is growing and on-premise is shrinking.

While I hope local AI continues to exist, I'm skeptical that it will take over, for the same reason running your own servers hasn't taken over. It's just hard, and involves spending huge sums of money up front.

It's also not really clear how much tokens are being subsidized. The discussion reminds me of Uber. For years people on HN claimed that Uber was going to collapse once they ran out of VC money. Then... that never happened, and everyone just moved on to discussing other things.