This is strategic. By making it so consumer grade hardware can't serve it, you have to pay them for access to it, and that funds the server hardware market, which keeps the AI market afloat. If they made smaller models, we would all be running local AI in a few years, nobody would pay them, and they would go bankrupt (and a worldwide recession would begin). It's going to be up to us (FOSS community) to train and publish our own small models. (Also because the US and China are going to make releasing open weights illegal or highly regulated soon)