[BrenBarn]

The difference is once you bought one of those chips you could do your own innovation on top of it (i.e., with software) without further interference from those well-funded companies. You can't do that with GPT et al. because of the subscription model.

[almogo]

Yes you can? Sure you can't run GPT5 locally, but get your hands on a proper GPU and you can run some still very sophisticated local inference.

[BrenBarn]

You can do some, but many of them have license restrictions that prevent you from using them in certain ways. I can buy an Intel chip and deliberately use it to do things that hurt Intel's business (e.g., start a competing company). The big AI companies are trying very hard to make that kind of thing impossible by imposing constraints on the allowed uses of their models.