> chat GPT, and for a while Midjourney are FREE

They are free for now. Eventually OpenAI will no longer be able to subsidize the compute costs of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for everybody... But yes, let's enjoy GPT-4 at cheap prices while we still can. I don't think we'll be able to in the near future.

I've been interested in a while in running some AI models locally, but ironically, I'd need to purchase a $3,000 computer to do so, and consider the steep hikes to my electricity bill as I run that machine.

MS have put it in Bing. Google will catch up and put it in google search.

I will happily pay whatever OpenAI charge to not have ads

It’s just too useful not to

Midjourney is the same. Saves soooooooo much time. It pays for itself for the month in a day

Fortunately I specced my laptop for vr so it should be able to quantized LLaMA 7b at least. ;)

You can get a stand alone headset for $399 but I guess that being a secret even among tech people is also a data point.

The bigger problem imo is lack of space. I used to have a VR space set up and would play frequently. But I have now moved and do not want to dedicate a huge amount of precious space to VR gaming.

Yeah, I think this is a big part of it. Just the general UX problems of hopping into it is a major blocker. I think this is a much bigger hurdle than unit price. Maybe MR will help with this a bit but who knows.

AFAIK all the cheap-ish (< $500) headsets either have awful specs, run android, or come bundled with spyware (or all of the above). Unless I missed a big product launch lately.

It's not a secret, more just that tech people don't want what's for sale.

I have a quest. It’s not a secret. But it’s still $400 more than FREE isn’t it.

Even $20 a month is a lot more manageable than a $400 up front + games

And chat GPT actually saves you time and money. It’s not just a bit of fun

Generative AI is really expensive hardware-wise, with high marginal costs. For now, a limited quantity usage is sponsored by the companies as PR to increase adoption, but in the long run for practical applications it won't be (can't be!) neither free nor cheap. Current models are intriguing but still need improvements, we know how to get those improvements by larger models, but all that means that the next iteration(s) will cost more money per 'answer'.

What I mean is, for an end user, it’s currently cheap and that must be a big factor in adoption.

IF you could get average VR for free and awesome VR for £20 a month, then I think the adoption curve would look a hell of a lot different.