> even license a SOTA model’s weights if you’d like
Yeah, I bet all labs releasing SOTA models are more than happy to remove the main way they make money and let you run it locally, especially if you're a big spender like Uber who seems very willing to throw money into the sea as an experiment.
I don't think they'll have a choice, open weights models are not far behind. At some point it's essentially a commodity game
That's going to stop eventually, and I think at that point we're going to see business models more like the major CAD providers.