As an "SRE engineer", I don't agree. Certainly in an university/R&D environment, you cannot compete with what 'the cloud' is able to offer within the reach of a few mouse clicks. It would be absolutely moronic to set up an entire infra yourself with GPU's, ... specifically tailored to for 1 research project to then throw it away after a few months, or see the scope change every 2 weeks.

One of the reasons such AI tech is able to move this fast because the cloud has become a commodity. People start to expect this kind of flexibility. It's impossible to self-host every possible thing some guy might want to try out.

Once you have a stable application - sure you might want to invest in own hosting for this, but even then it's an expensive up-front investment for something that might not go anywhere. I know a few places where they have a bunch of maxed-out nVidia DGX systems catching dust for exactly this reason.