From Altman’s perspective as a billionaire profiting from the rise of AI, yes, of course all that hardware would be better off in your hands, rented to corporations and consumers, one token at a time. The sentiment comes off as unimaginably elitist, even if it has a cold, robotic sense for pure allocation. One of the richest people on the planet believes he should have powerful hardware, not you.
And that seems to be the market trend, with RAM in laptops and phones increasing. backward for the first time in recent memory, even as every new device boasts of AI capability. Remember the big push Microsoft made for “Copilot+” laptops that met a minimum specification, a minimum that its latest (and still very expensive) Surface devices can’t even meet?
It’s a bit ironic that Microsoft is having so many problems with its Xbox platform. The cheapest Xbox now costs $500, and the next-generation “Helix” model is expected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 to produce. Microsoft has been struggling to keep Xbox competitive for over a decade, but it’s hard to feel bad for the company that’s also pushing AI into every one of its products, to the point where it had to apologize to Windows users.
Too bad for Sony and Nintendo, at least in theory, since their price increases are out of their control. Too bad Framework and Valve tried to make great hardware at the worst time imaginable. But don’t shed a tear for Microsoft: it’s out of breath.
The fall of AI floods gaming platforms
CEOs being out-of-touch elitists isn’t new (I’ll mention Epic CEO Tim Sweeney here for a very specific reason), and we’ve been dealing with a hardware pricing nightmare for about a year. But Steam’s recent Next Fest event highlighted how the AI issue is affecting the software side as well.
Next Fest has become a calendar event for gamers, a time when developers and publishers release demos of their exciting upcoming titles. But this year, with Steam absolutely infested with AI, things felt a little different. Although there were plenty of new things to try for PC gamers. But some developers are now cautious about releasing demos, fearing that their games will be used as templates for vibration-coded copycats.
