Things are probably going to get worse in the short term, but the AI bubble is going to burst. Magnitude? We'll see, but when investors realize that these companies cannot make a profit, and open source frontier models that allow you to run AI in house are removing vendor lock in, things are going to change. Also, LLMs are a dead end, and have little room to improve.
Newer paradigms are appearing, such as Yann LeCun's JASP, which actually learns, and other approaches, which will make LLMs obsolete, and are way less hardware intensive.
Another factor is the Chinese closing in in consumer grade RAM. If it can be proven that no backdoor or other shenanigans are there, they will balance things somewhat.
While current reality is what it is, there may be a massive social and traditional media manipulation by the big three and other interested parties to fuel fear of rising prices forever, to push people to buy as much as they can at these prices. I have no proof of this, but I don't think it's far fetched.
And let's not forget that for media outlets, fear and tragedy sells. (I think Hearst or some other news mogul said that last century.)
