I don't know the argument so I won't insist on the point, but I fail to see how it is relevant. Even if all proprietary LLMs disappeared today, efficiencies of scale alone mean the big cloud vendors can take the same open-weight LLMs you use locally, and sell inference with them for less money, and much more reliably, than you can afford yourself.
Local machines are a sunk cost, so using them is effectively free. Why would you pay a cloud host to run a model that can happily work on your MacBook?
If you have a machine and suddenly realize you can run LLMs on it, yes.
If you're buying a machine specifically so it's capable of running LLMs for you, then the purchase cost is your up-front payment for the inference you'll run.
And between that and electricity costs, cloud has you beat.
We were talking about the general case for personal use. What is possible on smartphones now with local models is not comparable to what people are using ChatGPT and friends for, and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future.
