The claim was "It is cheaper", not "It will be cheaper". Until it actually _is_ cheaper, it doesn't make much sense to purchase $10k+ in hardware to run local models that are still worse than the frontier offerings.

No it's not. AI products are quite often subsidized. AI inference very certainly is not.

There are more and more independent AI inference providers without VC backing that serve open weight models on a ~cost-plus basis that show that subsidies are not significant for AI inference.