I can imagine a couple scenarios in which a high-quality, large model would be much preferred over lower latency models, primarily when you need the quality.
Sometimes you may need to deal with odd proprietary processors with limited and flawed knowledge about them.
For example, in the 37c3 talk "Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains" by the folks from Dragon Sector (I highly recommend watching it), they needed to reverse-engineer Tricore binaries, however they found the Ghidra implementation had bugs.
As for the PLCs, the IEC 61131-3 functional block diagrams transpile to C code which then compiles to Tricore binaries using an obscure GCC fork. Not saying that anyone would want to write Rust code for PLCs, but this is not uncommon in the world of embedded.
If I had to wager a guess, bootc might get more actual use now that it's supported in RHEL 9.6 and 10 as "image mode". It's an exciting piece of technology, especially from the perspective of a platform engineer.
Also, bootc is a basis for the Universal Blue family of distros, especially Bazzite, which is very popular with gamers.
Holy hell, this is such a depressing, dehumanized, out-of-touch article—especially regarding the fascination with AI in the field of, admit it or not, art. The article even makes mistakes in the most basic factual areas, such as calling light novels "visual novels." It's deeply saddening.
For a more positive outlook on the animation industry, check out "Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!"—an incredibly creative love letter to the joy and passion of creating art through the lens of animation.
While YMMV, some smaller companies and manufacturers offer boards based on ARM or RISC-V cores. Consider checking out the MNT Reform - likely one of the closest computers that while a bit impractical, fills the openness criteria.
The article doesn't seem to mention AWS, really. I also feel like the primary issue is the lack of communication and support, even for a large corporate partner.
Seems like they're moving to bare-metal, which has an obvious benefit of being able to tell your on-call engineer to fix the issue or die trying.
SerenityOS is such an amazing project. "Oh, this thing would take a large team several years to build? Let's build it anyway!" The backstory behind the project is extremely admirable, too.
Bundling in major distros? (Say, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE(?)) GTK being open-source and quickly adopted by several popular projects? Being initially under the GNU Project? Probably a lot of factors adding together.
Checking Texas's CPA system, it seems like the company is (formally) active. The domain is registered at GoDaddy and it points to an IP in DigitalOcean's space.
If I had to assume, they probably still have some limited sales, support and consulting (ex. schools with teachers used to old software? companies with unusual development environments?).
While looking for Mix Software, Inc., though, I found their official(?) YouTube channel with the introductions for their C [0] and C++ [1] courses uploaded 8 years ago. They definitely have that old 90's VHS feeling to them, complete with music, early 3D animations and everything.
It would seem that the MIX C compiler for CP/M 80 got preserved at some point, too! [2] I'd need to look into it, but this looks promising.