Indeed, I feel like we are in the early computer equivalent phase of AI, where giant expensive hardware is still required for frontier models. In 5 years I bet there will be fully open models we'll be able to run on a few $1000 of consumer hardware with equivalent performance to opus 4.7/4.6.
I think intelligence per compute will go up significantly in the coming years, while the cost per compute will drop significantly. No way to know for sure, so I guess we'll see