How foolish do you have be to be worrying about ROI right now? The companies that are building out the datacenters produce billions per year in free cash flow. Maybe OP would prefer a dividend?
I say direct, because Chrome is free to users, yet clearly has a benefit to Google worth spending on both development and advertising the browser to users, and analogous profit sources may be coming to LLMs for similar reasons — you can use it locally so long as you don't mind every third paragraph being a political message sponsored by the Turquoise Party of Tumbrige Wells.
No it's not. Facebook hit $2B in Revenue in late 2010 - early 2011, ~5 years after its founding.
https://dazeinfo.com/2018/11/14/facebook-revenue-and-net-inc...