> These trends combined will mean that eventually it will seem old-fashioned to use a remotely-hosted model for anything other than the most demanding tasks.

If that happens, then I suspect we will see legislation that makes it illegal to use a model outside of those provided by approved vendors like OpenAI. The utility value of LLMs for influencing people as a propaganda and control tool is just too high for those in power to let this technology be democratized.

Look at the state of DRM for video streaming -- how much industry effort has been put into making sure consumers don't own their content? We will see an even bigger push with self-serve models.