> The first is to self host. You buy the machine, run open source models locally, and pay nothing per token after that.

In the good ol' days, we bought machines not only to run stuff, but to experiment.

I understand today experiments are limited. Inference is reasonable, fine-tuning is either niche or a stretch, and base training is impossible.

*That is bound to change*, and when it does, there will be an avalanche of hobbysts and amateurs poking at base training. They'll find optimizations no one found before, synthetize data no one ever imagined to synthetize, and when that happens we'll start getting libre models.

So, yeah. Right now, buying the machine doesn't pay off that well, unless you want to pioneer this stuff in severe adverse conditions (hardware prices inflated, etc). Eventually, it will.