> I should be able to get a cheap / run my own 600B param model.

if the margins on hosted inference are 80%, then you need > 20% utilization of whatever you build for yourself for this to be less costly to you (on margin).

i self-host open weight models (please: deepseek et al aren't open _source_) on whatever $300 GPU i bought a few years ago, but if it outputs 2 tokens/sec then i'm waiting 10 minutes for most results. if i want results in 10s instead of 10m, i'll be paying $30000 instead. if i'm prompting it 100 times during the day, then it's idle 99% of the time.

coordinating a group buy for that $30000 GPU and sharing that across 100 people probably makes more sense than either arrangement in the previous paragraph. for now, that's a big component of what model providers, uh, provide.