> many people realised that it is possible to run a serious open-weight model yourself, as long as you can get the hardware to support it
That's not realistic. You'd need non-consumer hardware for a frontier open-weights model. And even if you had such hardware for free. Electricity to run it would cost you more than a sub.
When I said "running it yourself" I didn't mean me personally running it at home. That will be unfeasible. A company can afford it though and also a supplier that serves multiple customers can do that as well. In fact, I was talking to a company that does this and the model is fully in UK where we need them to be.
At the end of the day it is about the sense of optionality. We know that this is the business model for almost all open source projects. It is not like you cannot download and run the project yourself and some do for practical reasons, but often times the cloud version is priced such that it is the path of least resistance so people go for that.
That's not realistic. You'd need non-consumer hardware for a frontier open-weights model. And even if you had such hardware for free. Electricity to run it would cost you more than a sub.