Comment by TeMPOraL
3 hours ago
I don't know the argument so I won't insist on the point, but I fail to see how it is relevant. Even if all proprietary LLMs disappeared today, efficiencies of scale alone mean the big cloud vendors can take the same open-weight LLMs you use locally, and sell inference with them for less money, and much more reliably, than you can afford yourself.
Local machines are a sunk cost, so using them is effectively free. Why would you pay a cloud host to run a model that can happily work on your MacBook?
Most people don’t have local machines with sufficient computational power and RAM.
If you have a machine and suddenly realize you can run LLMs on it, yes.
If you're buying a machine specifically so it's capable of running LLMs for you, then the purchase cost is your up-front payment for the inference you'll run.
And between that and electricity costs, cloud has you beat.