The incumbents will go broke.
Who do you mean with that? Companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, or do you also include the likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft?
With the former I can see it, but the later also profit from providing the infrastructure (and have other profitable business), so imo those will be just fine.
If you don’t mind Meta/Facebook, then the oculus quest headsets are also very affordable hardware and deliver a good experience. I think the issue lies with content.
Smartphones or handhelds like the steam deck with flat screens could use plenty of already existing content made for screens. With VR you want different content that is made specifically for it. There is a decent amount of games (but still much fewer than for other devices), but honestly not that much more.
Additionally it also can only really be used at home, where most already have other devices.
It’s a chicken and egg problem. But imo if there were more genuine unique productivity tasks and experiences available through VR, we would see more adoption.
I’ve never faced that challenge, but my first idea would have been to make a VPN connection with something like tailscale. After that you could transfer data however you’d do it over a local network.
Lemmynsfw.com is quite large and purely dedicated to NSFW content.
Yes, it does make a difference, but like with many other things you should not fall into the trap of decision making paralysis.
Your current instance lemmy.world is the largest and perfectly adequate for the majority. It also costs nothing to make accounts on other instances and is done in less time than it takes to decide between them.
That said some reasons to choose one instance over another:
Federation with other instances
Some instances choose not to federate with others. Common reasons being political ideology or NSFW/piracy/violent content. Others might be more liberal and leave it up to their users to block whatever within their own apps. As someone already mentioned world seems to have defederated dbzer0 the piracy focused instance. Some political instances that often also get defederated are the far left ones like hexbear and Lemmy grad (seems like those are defederated by lemmy.world as well).
Server location and performance
Especially country focused instances like lemmy.ca or feddit.uk will have their servers in their own countries. You can of course access them from anywhere, but a European user might have a better time choosing an instance with servers located in Europe, while someone in America might have lower latency with one located there.
Alternate frontends
If you are accessing Lemmy through a browser rather than an app, you might enjoy alternate frontends that change the design. Your current one lemmy.world for example offers 4 different designs that can also be found in the sidebar alexandrite, photon, voyager mobile and one looking like old.reddit.
General ideology of the instance
Your choice of instance might also tell others something about you. If you choose a country specific instance people seeing your profile name might assume you come from there, if you choose one with a particular political view people will probably assume you hold similar views. Same goes for other instances that are related to things like sexuality or hobbies.
That’s just it for me. At this stage there really isn’t much more to do than to give a generic apology and the promise to investigate, improve and make up for things. Nobody (should) expect to see any instant consequences.
The bar is so low and yet they can’t even do that. And GN even showed them how it is done in their video. Specifically calling out that this is a matter that should not be monetized.
As i understand it most of the money they are investing goes into new datacenters. So when a model gets outdone by a new one they still have those, unlike e.g. OpenAI that use other companies resources (i think microsoft and oracle mostly?). In a way companies that use those external clouds to train their own models are financing the investments needed for the big players.
AWS, GCP and Azure are all growing 30%+ yoy, are profitable and if anything supply constraint in that they can’t build more capacity fast enough to meet demand. So it seems to me that to some degree they are already recouping some of those investments. I don’t see a drop in demand for compute, and even if using/training ai would become less resource intensive, Jevons paradox would just lead to more demand.
Of course they also burn a lot of money as anytime a new model gets trained and beats the older ones, it kind of renders the resources spend on the previous one worthless. But to me that seems like the cost of doing business.
The current investments they can afford. What would actually lead to shedding huge amounts of marketcap is, if they’d let a rival establish themselves. Similar to how the movie studios didn’t get into streaming early (mostly to not hurt their cable business) and gave Netflix enough time to establish themselves.
To comment on something you mentioned in another reply below:
I think the big money will be in the business world, where salaries for actual people are high enough that saving a person even a few hours/week or replacing a single employee saves so much money that even expensive subscriptions would easily be worth it.
On the consumer side as you say running smaller models locally will likely be the norm. But that means it would be free for both the likes of Deepseek and Google. And then it’ll just come down to who has access to personal information and is better embedded, which would be likely be whoever also controls other aspects of a users life, such as Goole with Android, gmail etc. Money here will be made just as it is done with other free services.