Who pays for email?

That you don’t pay for gmail doesn’t mean it isn’t monetized. Google makes $220 Billion a year from ads.

Who pays subscriptions for file backup?

Google drive, Onedrive, and iCloud are forced down all users throats. Millions pay. A quick google says Apple makes $96 Billion a year from iCloud alone.

the problem is that as soon as they try to put the squeeze on their customers they will just go somewhere else that offers the same thing

If it were that easy Google wouldn’t make $350B a year. Google is just a search index and not very good.

Look at what happened with Deepseek; OpenAI can’t maintain dominance.

Yes, and Google displaced Yahoo. That doesn’t mean search stopped being monetized.

Nvidia is artificially limiting vram but that’s not going to remain the limitation for long.

It’s not VRAM, it’s ram in general. Deepseek needs ~700GB. Ram prices have been dropping about 30% every 5 years (and that’s ideal numbers. Moore’s law is dead. Current improvements are smaller than looking back 5 years). It’s about $6k to build your own Epyc for 6 tokens/sec. No average person is going to spend $6k when a service does it for $10 a month and is 10x faster. Do the math for how long it will be until $6k of ram costs $600.

But the real killer that will keep AI out of consumer hands for forever is that it is reliant on new models to include updated information that was scraped from the Internet. If you ask Deep Seek about anything that’s happened in the past year, it can’t give any answers because the model was built with older data. So Google, Apple, Microsoft and anyone capable of indexing the entire web will always have an AI model that is updated with the latest information. Home users will be lucky to get models with information that is several years out of date. Building models requires 100x the resources as running the trained model and you need the data to train it.