Nothing natural about it. Such monopolies were propped up by the state using public funds and profits captured by the capital class. Many benefitted by the arrangement and so it became normalized. But it’s a choice people made to structure things that way.

The car industry, oil and gas… all could have played out differently if different players had gained wider adoption or if governments used a different economic model.

local models are going to win and therefore the hardware providers, Apple and nvidia.

There isn't going to be any moat for the hosted providers besides hardware scale. They can run your request on shared 1TB memory hardware, or whatever.

But local hardware is going to catch up, the hosted providers are going to become commoditized, and the costs are just going to be compute whether its your hardware or theirs.

And your laptop is going to be powerful enough to be good enough for most cases.