For 2026, I am really interested in seeing whether local models can remain where they are: ~1 year behind the state of the art, to the point where a reasonably quantized November 2026 local model running on a consumer GPU actually performs like Opus 4.5.

I am betting that the days of these AI companies losing money on inference are numbered, and we're going to be much more dependent on local capabilities sooner rather than later. I predict that the equivalent of Claude Max 20x will cost $2000/mo in March of 2027.

Huh, that’s interesting, I’ve been having very similar thoughts lately about what the near-ish term of this tech looks like.

My biggest worry is that the private jet class of people end up with absurdly powerful AI at their fingertips, while the rest of us are left with our BigMac McAIs.