alt Hacker NewsPractically if you're running a small personal automation project you're not going to want to waste a lot of time configuring and tuning a local model. You want to build the automation and move on.
If you're building a automation as a company you definitely won't want to take on the long term maintenance overhead of running your own models for some automation project.
These small models exist in the cloud and are/will be priced commensurately to their size.
Your claim is effectively that companies don't care about operational/cloud costs. Even pre-LLM, companies regularly assessed and tried to pare down cloud spend.