Here's how I imagine the timeline playing out.
The first thing we're going to do is democratize compute, by reworking the principles a little. This isn't hard. Anyone can do it. Few people are thinking about it seriously.
This means rethinking the architecture of inference. If you do the math, against what's actually possible, and you ignore the fact that Python and CUDA are an evolutionary dead end as far as languages go, the picture starts to become clearer.
What we're going to do at that point, is release some oddly powerful agent systems that utilize new and novel training methods, designed to work, primarily, on CPU. These systems are going to be open source and run, essentially, for free as the bottom falls out of per token rates globally.
All of a sudden your $3 a month vps can support a multi-graph asynchronous agent system with no corporate ties.
Expect this by December.
Shortly afterward, Intel and AMD both become major players in the AI space, as people resurrect their junk laptops in droves, and begin to mesh them together.
This will affect all devices, but expect x64 to come first.
Compute and the structures of power
Public perception of AI changes when it's in the hands of everyone. Artists, creatives, people who are entitled to the technology, are being left out because the cost of compute is simply, and still way too high.
By March of 2026, thousands of people will have made $50,000,000 with nothing more than an agent swarm and a laptop. By September, you'll see one of them become a billionaire. Then two, then a hundred, then a thousand, then tens of millions of people.
Poverty disappears as a concept globally.
The structures of power change dramatically.
Corporations as the keepers of scale almost entirely disappear. At least as we understand the concept today, as trillions of dollars in new generated wealth hits new hands.
We're looking at an economic big bang.
Small low power systems beget even smaller but more powerful low systems until the technology becomes invisible.
After that, it's hard to know what happens.
World peace? Maybe, but I doubt it. There will always be something to argue about.
Maybe space travel?
Finally figuring out portal guns?
Dunno.
Suffice it to say, that all we know about the people who live in 2035, is that they imagine an eight-hour work day as a mortal struggle, and they ask their parents why they tolerated the injustice of it all for so long.
We probably won't have any good excuses for it, when we look back.