While I do think there's going to be a huge market for cloud-based LLM serving, the fact that consumer hardware can run close to SOTA models fairly easily (e.g. high-RAM MBP config), seems to me that the provider market won't be as big as investors are betting on. Most of the rewards will be reaped by consumers rather than providers. We're also in an age where the current levels of RAM in consumer devices were almost…
Enterprises use LLMs too, and quite often there wouldn't be any client you could reasonably run the model on. (You wouldn't want to e.g. have an LLM summarize and categorize a user request on their device, since that would require you shipping your model and/or internal knowledge base to the client).
It's a highly competitive market. Companies aren't going to pay 100k/year to run a model on something that can run on a 2k consumer grade device.
128GB of gpu accessible/fast RAM can be had for $5000 on a macbook pro today. What will it be 3-4 years from now on linux/windows machines?
And we still haven't seen any SoC providers try to optimize for RAM capacity over compute yet.