Most people shouldn't host locally at all.

Of those who do, I can see students and researchers benefiting from small models. Students in particular are famously short on money for fancy hardware.

My experience trying one of the Phi models (I think 3, might have been 2) was brief, because it failed so hard: my first test was to ask for a single page web app Tetris clone, and not only was the first half the output simply doing that task wrong, the second half was a sudden sharp turn into python code to train an ML model — it didn't even delimit the transition, one line javascript, the next python.