The mining parallel is sharp, but there's one difference that matters: miners compete for a finite reward pool. Local AI doesn't. You're not racing against anyone else to run Llama — you just need enough compute to make it useful.
That means the cost ceiling should eventually come down. Moore's Law and economies of scale don't care about hype cycles. We saw it with GPUs for gaming, we'll see it again for inference. The question is timing — and for the people who need it now, that's not a satisfying answer.
Where the mining analogy really clicks though: centralization. Mining consolidated around whoever could afford scale. AI compute is heading in the same direction. The early movers lock in advantage, everyone else rents from them. Whether that's acceptable depends on whether you think competition eventually breaks it open or entrenches it further.
The mining parallel is sharp, but there's one difference that matters: miners compete for a finite reward pool. Local AI doesn't. You're not racing against anyone else to run Llama — you just need enough compute to make it useful.
That means the cost ceiling should eventually come down. Moore's Law and economies of scale don't care about hype cycles. We saw it with GPUs for gaming, we'll see it again for inference. The question is timing — and for the people who need it now, that's not a satisfying answer.
Where the mining analogy really clicks though: centralization. Mining consolidated around whoever could afford scale. AI compute is heading in the same direction. The early movers lock in advantage, everyone else rents from them. Whether that's acceptable depends on whether you think competition eventually breaks it open or entrenches it further.