Self hosted local ai will go mainstream... but... it will be different from central ai. Local ai will be like a microchip in a dishwasher. It can perform small(and not so small) helpful tasks.

The big central ai on the other hand will decide the direction of society. It will make the five year plans, it will decide on the capital allocations. It will acheive the scientific breakthroughs and it will declare the wars and negotiate truces.

Around the big central ai a class society will form. The top: The people training the AI. After that, the people building the harnesses. After that the AI SEO people, working to manipulate the AI from the outside. Then the power users, they are trusted and can access the AI model with less guard rails. The great mass will be normal users. Finally the very lowest are those the AI has decided are bad people, they may have trouble accessing the AI or the AI may make decisions designed to punish and disempower them until they align with the AI.

We've been here before. At one point, standard computing was centralized among a handful of large service providers. Then the PC came along and made it local and as they say --- the rest is history.

AI is unpredictable --- and so is the billing. Users of services can't predict the quality of the results or the final, overall cost to achieve a goal.

It all boils down to, "Do you feel lucky, punk?".