- They can afford to dish out hardware to run models locally - They can afford to deploy even larger open weight models on their own infra, even if they’re not local

In addition, the writing is on the wall. These open weight models are getting good enough and small enough with each iteration. Hardware will (hopefully) come down in price eventually so a layman could deploy these locally.

As AI boosters love to say: [Local models are] “the worst they’ll ever be right now!”