[whimsicalism]

1. The value in proprietary software largely lies in the source code, which is not available in on-premises, you are talking about compiled binaries. There is no such thing as "compiled binaries" for neural network weights.

2. License/copyright - Even in the best possible case, there are plenty of jurisdictions that don't care about US copyright and would love to get a hand on those weights.

3. We haven't seen copyright cases around model weights before. If I managed to exfiltrate OpenAIs model weights, I would continue training for a few iterations and then I think it would be quite difficult to prove that I actually have the same model as OpenAI. This is untested, why would they risk it.

4. Running these models requires a ton of resources, vastly beyond the typical onprem deployment - why would Azure invest in making this possible when it really could only impact a very small percentage of companies?

The weights are OAIs lifeblood, I imagine they are very protective of them.