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AI's Personal Revolution: Threat to Big Tech's Dominance?

There are many people feeling anxious—rightly so—about their own future because of the impressive advances in AI. If we stop to think about it, five years ago this wasn’t a concern for almost anyone, whether individuals or companies. It was something that appeared “out of nowhere” and caused such a massive disruption that giants like Google and Microsoft had to rethink their strategies. OpenAI has existed since 2015, quietly working in an unusual direction compared to the rest of the industry, and when ChatGPT took off globally, the revolution gained real momentum. Today, there’s a lot of talk about the subsidized costs of AI and how this will be unsustainable in the long run—that the bubble will burst, and so on. And that’s where I disagree: to me, there are smaller projects happening around the world, focusing on things that the big players can’t currently afford to prioritize. One example would be optimizing models or personal hardware in such a way that you could run them on your own computer without needing million-dollar equipment. If a large company were to achieve this, I’d bet on Apple or Nvidia—that is, hardware-focused companies. Apple, in particular, seems very suspicious to me, since it hasn’t made major moves during the AI hype and has remained quite quiet on the subject. Just remember that computers existed long before they became PCs (personal computers). Many people didn’t believe that an average person would ever need a computer at home. And the revolution came when computers became personal and accessible products. To me, something similar could happen at some point—and it could cause significant losses for companies that are currently investing massive amounts of money in expanding data centers to process AI.