In parallel, local models are getting better and better, so eventually they’ll get “good enough” to run fairly cheaply at a level close to the current Sonnet/Opus models (what I run Claudeclaw with), on Groq, Openrouter or whatever commodity provider. Perhaps even mid to high end consumer PCs when the current RAM madness subsides.

There’s loads of good discussions about local LLMs in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997

> tokens will stop being dirt cheap

That can't be allowed, and also won't happen. If token costs do start going up at a serious rate in the US, you can be sure that they'll stay down in China, and the political situation won't allow for the inevitable exodus to Chinese providers.