Comment by codethief

Exactly! As I've argued here on HN before, such an "LLM in a box" might end up being serviced/upgraded once or twice a year by a company very similar to the one servicing the coffee machine at the office. In contrast to databases, storage, etc. it doesn't matter much if the box breaks at some point – they'll just come by and replace it with a new one – and there's barely any software on the box to speak of, at least none that requires continuous development and feature upgrades, beyond rolling out security patches. This makes the business case drastically different from cloud and SaaS offerings, where most of the moat is in the software and the state maintenance (and the vendor lock-in of course). The LLM in a box is destined to become a commodity.