Comment by dannyw

Some people/companies/whatever might like the convenience and scalability of managed solutions, especially if you're say, just building something simple like a Slack bot with your custom workplace tools/data.

Yes, the lock-in is real and only good for OpenAI, but there's absolutely demand for managed services where you defer the responsibility of security patching; scaling; uptime, etc to a third party provider. Just like why people use AWS/GCP/etc over bare metal in a colo.