I keep seeing this narrative involving Deepseek as an example of OSS LLMs but they are subsidizing a huge amount of tokens at cost and one can easily understand why they are doing it if one is not lazy and think critically.

It's still far too costly and not effective to use Local AI that can match what the frontier models can offer, especially when the inference hardware is being heavily restricted due to geopolitical risks. Claims about local LLMs somehow putting these frontier companies a run for their money I find especially doubtful in the long run.

Tokens are getting expensive because they are beginning to corner the market and will use that advantage to limit hardware distribution within and beyond the borders.

It's more likely that some workflows will see more local LLMs but those will never be the ones that require frontier model level or beat the price that a lighter smaller version of frontier model will offer to capture that tail end