Buy vs. rent vs. build decision optimization is an eternal dilemma with only one universal answer: "It depends." Maximize wherever practicable and ethical:

    Reward*P(Success) - Penalty*P(1-Success) - OpportunityCost

The man has forgotten that those LLM models don't grow on trees in nature, freely available to anyone.

Don't be a sucker - go create your own model, train it for hundreds of millions of dollars. With your own money - you aren't a sucker to borrow from anyone. Fine tune a model, train it again.

Only then, when and if you're get done, will you be able to claim "I'm not sucker, I don't rent anything. And you shouldn't too!".

Until then, no model is yours. Even if you run it locally, you're inevitably engaging in renting it, if not for money directly, then for knowledge and expertise of those large companies. The ones that've created them for you. With an option to utilize them for free, locally.

I generally think there is a lot of good use for local models. Works like Lucy have a ton of potential to help drive tools, do basic reasoning. https://huggingface.co/Menlo/Lucy

But I think this week we are seeing a lot of extremely capable large models. DeepSeek V3 (670B) was joined by Kimi K2 (1T), and now Qwen3 Coder (480B). Trying to run these at home with any reasonable speed is very hard. Smaller models can be quite useful too but I feel like one absolutely wants to be able to tap these large models for a lot of core crucial work. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

Reminds me a bit of this post:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

> For example let's look at Microsoft pricing. Using a single macOS runner for 1 year costs 0.08 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 42 thousand USD. Meanwhile, for Zig's CI testing we purchased a beefy mac mini for $3000 two years ago.

Hard to explain this to some folks

If your entire usecase is asking for a box to be turned on and nearly nothing else, sure. But I'm enjoying not having to think / care about app updates, migrations, ISP policies about hosting, etc. I'm glad to pay for someone else to do those things. Same like how I pay for someone to care about the email servers I use.

Maybe consider using EU-based alternatives such as Mistral Le Chat, and StackIT. That at least gives privacy and transparency mandated by law.

But yeah, migrating the core business systems to cloud surely adds risk of lock-in, as well as juridical and geopolitical risks.

The reason companies and shareholders love SaaS is because it reduces opX and increases CapEx on the budget sheet.

These are very similar financial engineer dynamics that drove the large outsourcing drive in the late and early 2000s.