These systems in weights are proof of concepts. Surely there is room for optimization in there somewhere.

Yes, there is.

It's called a Nintendo emulator.

That's kind of the point here.

Code isn't going anywhere. It can be literally billions or trillions of times more efficient than an AI, and as AIs scale up that number just continues to grow and can completely plausibly hit quadrillions in our lifetime. What relationships humans have with code is a completely different question, but the idea itself isn't going anywhere. Anyone who thinks otherwise has failed to grasp just what producing a single token from an AI actually entails.

It would be baking the model into hardware or FPGA, which ends up building the same thing being emulated. An emulated ALU in hardware is ... the ALU.