Where are people going to run their models? I for one will choose the cloud I already use. It has APIs for the big models and simple deployment of both open source and other proprietary models.
This is completely separate from providing end users a service. How many people self host or run their own alternatives when there are managed services available? It is unlikely people are going to switch en mass to open source models, especially while there is a price war on SoTA models. It's becoming far cheaper to call a SoTA API than have an always on open source model.
From my experience, running a small model locally was both slower (tokens/sec plus overall system slowdown) and had worse results. I switched to cloud based APIs and will likely not consider reversing this decision. Multiple orders of magnitude improvements would need to happen in both performance and quality