Right - the future of LLMs is like ol' windows XP+Dell. Commercialized "things" you run locally offline, co-designed with hardware, with a known productivity suite, and large businesses building the next generation thing and suite with 18mo release cycles (ish).
XP? I can see the argument for enterprise support but in that case the latest windows OS is going to be virtually free and I dont know if MS and Dell etc. would even support an XP machine. Might even be required for hardware. If no enterprise support wouldnt Linux make a lot more sense?
I get that if it's offline the security downside of XP doesnt matter, and I assume XP is free, but being free doesnt really seem that valuable compared to alternatives (free linux and virtually free OS if buying wholesale).
There's waayyyy too much money betting on that not happening, to the point I feel there'll be regulations popping up for "safety reasons" etc to ensure the big players control this.
I don't see it. Leasing equipment and paying per seat license fees makes a lot of accounting and cash flow sense. Maybe when it gets to the point where you can run SOTA LLMs on consumer hardware. But that seems a solid decade and probably much more away.
Even then it makes more sense to rent the bigger GPU and get your answer faster.