not sure why you quoted me, too. I know that reverse-engineering knowledge does not bring us closer to libre hardware. I also know that the thing they currently hype as AI is not even close to do reverse engineering, so I don’t agree with you on that. And in 20 years from now, AI will still not do that. I’ll bet on that.
Anyway, what I said is, you need market pressure to change the fate. Purism is building this pressure. That is exactly their plan. If they order 10,000 chips, the manufacturer might politely deny libre firmware. If they can order 100,000 it is more likely that the manufacturer will agree to open the source. That’s the way to go.
If you really think a small company can design and manufacture such chips on their own, that might be your wishful thinking. If it were that easy, they’d do it already.
I mean, it’s not completely out of the question, but it has a similar prerequisite: To develop such chips on your own, you need to grow the business first, because this is very expensive and complicated.
However, @TungstenFilament worded that much better than I can: