I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary.

The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advantages too.

It's definitely not temporary from POV the billionaires trying to carve out a worker-free lifestyle.