I think the wildest thing about what we're experiencing now, is that basically anyone an access it. For all of history, crazy new physical technical tools and gadgets would be limited to the few who could afford it.

Even DALLE was fully closed off, but only for less than 2 years. And now we have many free image generators like Craiyon that equal or surpass what DALLE 1 was. And with stable diffusion, we get the cutting edge immediately.

But what makes this different from hardware is that AI theoretically has unlimited uses, assuming it can achieve the same learning and problem-solving capabilities as a human brain eventually. (And I see no reason why it wouldn't)

So everybody gets all the tools immediately with just a download.