> but a lot of people are going to multiply the per-month charge by 12 or 24 and say "Could I set up a local model for less than that, and have it pay for itself within a year or two?" And if a significant portion of customers decide to buy instead of rent, the companies whose business model is entirely centered around renting will suddenly find themselves hurting for customers.

And those are going to all be big enterprise companies that probably will set up LLM services entirely in-house, because they've got the headcount to utilize servers at 100%.

I wonder if there will be (or is currently) business in selling their compute while they're not working, to opposite time zones, etc.

What's left for the big providers will be the dregs of individual subscriptions and small businesses that at their least paranoid might let employees just use their own subscriptions for work.