> Almost all of these companies have the technical ability, desire, and means to self-host for their employee community.
Well, one of companies I worked for could have hosted a canary service for cron jobs. But we bought it instead of building because we were focused on building features. And here you’re talking about hosting an entire LLM.
The cron job canary was probably not a service that employees were uploading tonnes of company confidential material into, was it? So I fail to see how the comparison makes sense.
The reason companies shun OpenAI and want a self hosted alternative isn't related to costs, it's becasue they don't want their code, internal emails, documentation etc to be uploaded to Microsoft and thus also directly to the NSA.
Well, one of companies I worked for could have hosted a canary service for cron jobs. But we bought it instead of building because we were focused on building features. And here you’re talking about hosting an entire LLM.