What is the use case you see for non-technical users self-hosting? I think it’s important that tools remain available but I don’t expect it to be adopted by “average consumers.”

I’m interested in self-hosting for privacy and control. I already owned the hardware I’m testing with, so my spend is limited to time and electricity.

The “LLM pods” you describe will be loaded with spyware and adware (see: Smart TVs), and average consumers won’t max their compute around the clock so naturally data centers are able to make more efficient use of hardware by maximizing utilization.

There are local ai pods. They're like 2k for a low end.