I suspect we will see more companies which will burn the weights right in to silicon arise. There is already at least one company out there that showed its possible so others will follow IMO. Basically you will see the rise of disposable weights like Nintendo cartridges back in the day. Use it for a time until the better model comes out and you get a new "chip". Though there's a caveat for this business model and that requires you to pump out lots of these chips on the cheap so you are beholden to the lithography companies and what they can produce for you. If you can do this at scale and doesn't require the latest state of the art nm architecture design you are golden...
> There is already at least one company out there that showed its possible so others will follow IMO.
Are your referring to Taalas / chatjimmy ?
I definitely think we'll see an ASIC-like approach in the future, especially for embedded small models where it may require minimal silicon area and can result in near-realtime performance. But at the frontier, I don't think this is a solved problem and will continue to have model weight churn that will advantage more flexible general-purpose hardware.