Rentals are priced to pay themselves off in 1-1.5 years (when renting them out per hour, not selling tokens). Its never a better option to rent.

Not that I'd encourage anyone to throw large amounts of money to have access to LLMs, but you're definately going to be better off buying something that you can amortize over multiple years with a multi year warranty.

It is possible to get real work done with LLMs. There are plenty of ethical concerns, and they're definitely over-hyped, but they are exceptionally useful tools when used well.

I upvoted your comment even though I disagree with you.

Yes, LLMs are sloppy, and local models usually more so (but things change fast).

But the local ones have one big advantage: they are private. So you can safely feed them the collection of your private documents and things you wouldn't trust people like sama with. The fact that some people do not care is one of the failures of our educational system.

These models contain a wealth of knowledge that is being censored, not just deliberately, but by training data bias. Fine-Tuning and steering can produce unexpected new insights. For example a model that is trained to believe so-called "conspiracy theories", which many believe to be the ground truth.