And if you can run those strong models at home for free, why would hosting them be a successful business for any of these providers?
Profitable maybe, in terms of having low costs, but why pay Google or whoever when you can do it yourself for cheaper/"free"?
For free == with a huge upfront cost of getting a good enough box and running costs of maintaining it and just keeping it powered. By the time it pays off the frontier labs are three generations ahead at least.
Compare with on-demand billing per token and it just doesn’t make sense to own the hardware if you aren’t using it productively or renting it out for 95% of the time.
If you can run your server at home for free why would hosting it be a successful business for any of these propviders?