Even acknowledging we don't know exactly what costs would look like in a world without VC money, wouldn't hosting models logically be cheaper to do at scale in a data center?
When I compared to the cost of running DeepSeek locally, I meant that we can treat that cost as a price ceiling, not the floor.
No, I think local stuff using also-useful-for-other-things hardware will vastly undercut cloud hosting when the free money pipeline shuts down, and will stay that way for roughly forever. That doesn't mean cloud stuff isn't useful, clearly it is, but adding another company in the middle is rarely the solution for reducing costs.