I hear you on vendor lock-in. Everyone's freaked out about other companies getting the upper-hand with AI in the loop, so there's this charge to use the hell out of it at all costs. Meanwhile, we're quietly picking winners and losers on the service side of all this, and we'll have to live with that outcome for a long time.
At this point, I'm seriously considering what it would take to build a reasonable budget-AI box that's self-hosted. It wouldn't need to blow the doors off of Claude, just get me most of the way there. Maybe even build it out of used and/or last-gen GPUs and a beefy motherboard.
Right now, self-hosting is too expensive if you’re starting from scratch. We have an old EliteDesk that can run the most basic of models, but it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Electricity is also quite expensive in many places, it adds up.
If hardware prices ever come back to sane levels, eh… the Framework desktop with Ryzen AI might be interesting to play with.
Self-hosting right now is in a weird spot. I'd say that the main benefit of the open models is not self-hosting, but having dozens of different independent providers that can host them for you. You aren't stuck with a single one.