The dumping -> non-competitive price increases playbook is historically very, very rare, and relies on a monopoly (or in a few cases oligopoly) with large externally-enforced barriers to entry. The oligopoly case is highly unstable and doesn't last, and besides we don't have notable barriers to entry; we have both market competitors and locally-hosted imperfect substitute goods.

There's essentially no reason to believe the dynamic you're predicting could succeed here, because we lack all the conditions that make it more likely to succeed, and it's very rare anyway.

So it's analogous to the mythical bogeyman version of what fracking was hyped up to be, and not how it actually turned out.

And of course people can have both.

I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.

People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).

The difference between an average diet and a vegan diet via Scarborough et al. 2023/Poore & Nemecek 2018 is in the realm of 1450kg CO2e/year.

Assuming those numbers, that difference is around 14,500 prompts per day, or ~5.3M prompts per year.

So unless the prompt estimates are off by more than two orders of magnitude...

Farmers grow alfalfa in the desert and drain the western US's aquifers and rivers because we have insane water rights doctrines that entitle them to trillions and trillions of gallons of free or almost-free water far in excess of what the watershed regions can bear.

If we don't change that system, data center water usage is a rounding error that is barely noticeable at the scale of the problem. If we do change that system, data center water usage isn't a problem at all.