[Sharlin]

Even if it were freely available, there's no way to run GPT3 or ChatGPT on any existing desktop hardware. The exact hardware requirements aren't public either (yes, very "open") but a full 175-billion-parameter GPT3 instance requires hundreds of gigabytes of GPU memory, and even though ChatGPT is "smaller and better", when it comes to conversational dialogue, there's no way to fit it in current consumer hardware.

[lambdaba]

Will it ever be an option, perhaps the first option, given some evolution in the software and/or hardware?

[Sharlin]

Ever? Likely. Hardware keeps improving, and better training techniques will almost certainly keep shrinking model sizes ceteris paribus. But one should also remember that these are static models that can't learn anything that was not present in the original training corpus, so for some use cases that rely on current information they're simply not a good match. And training a model like this requires vastly more hardware (and human) resources than just using it. Never mind the issue of collecting a corpus in the first place.