If the market crashes, and I can buy a TB of TPU on the cheap, I can host 4.1 flash myself. :D

I'm fairly confident that the crash will happen because token prices fall through the floor due to competition from the open source models. This will destroy the valuation of the AI firms and their ability to raise capital, so they'll stop spending hundreds of billions per annum on training.

OTOH, this price crash will increase demand for inference. Maybe some data centres will go bankrupt, but the scavengers won't be selling off used TPU's for cheap, they'll operate those data centers to sell you tokens for cheap.

> competition from the open source models

Right and this is why they're going to become subject to import/export controls, labeled as a national security risk, etc.

Open source models are just going to... disappear?

No. The vast majority of SWE are not going back to 'hand coding' so this will not happen.

Outside of the productivity weasels I'm not sure most of SWE actually enjoys using AI to code.