This is such a tired argument and it seems to be parroted every single time someone talks about local models on hacker news.

Yes, of course the most economical path is to hand over all your data and become fully dependent on a cloud provider who is already operating as scale, hoping that they won't change/remove models, hamstring capabilities, or raise prices.

If this were a thread about hosting your own email or blog or cloud photos, you'd have plenty of people out here telling you how easy it is to do it yourself instead of relying on Gmail for email or WordPress/Medium/Substack for blogging, or iCloud for cloud photos.

And yet, without fail, every single thread about self hosting local models seems to have some copy/paste form of this cost-savings argument.

Where is the appreciation for this cool thing GP built? Where is the appreciation for the desire to figure out how to host your own version of the incredible capabilities that were not available merely a few years ago? And why, on this site of all places, would someone advocate trading all of the knowledge and independence gained from learning how to host something like this ourselves in favor of throwing it all over the wall to Google?

Come on.