Ask HN: Will it be a viable business model to offer llama.cpp as a service?

Short answer, possibly, especially if it was say part of a rag system or some other architecture like that. There is room for more. Nothing particularly special about llama.cpp as the llm back end though. It's optimized for running on lower-end hardware which matters less if you're serving models as a service. But it has many strengths.

Llama.cpp / ggml is the open core of ggml.ai founded by GG and funded by the guy from github, so they have some monetization plan for it.

Why would you need it as cpp? Do you mean just llama or specifically a version small enough running on edge?

Do you mean just a non-fine tuned chat bot based on llama 70b? Probably not.

I suspect no.