[cjf101]

Yes, this is true. But, I worry about how long it will take for the utility of "GPT-4" on my phone to be close enough to whatever is only possible through models running on large cloud platforms to make that choice relatively drawback free.

Is the curve of what this class of algorithms can provide sigmoid? If so, then yeah, eventually researchers should be able to democratize it sufficiently that the choice to use versions that can run on private hardware rational. But if the utility increases linearly or better over time/scale, the future will belong to whoever owns the biggest datacenters.