IMO AI companies are selling the infrastructure and easier access to the models, beyond competing to get the smarter model. We can run Qwen locally, but at what cost? A good enough GPU for running 27B is more than 4,000 USD where I live (Brazil). Even if I were to spend 100s of hours in credits I would never reach a point where the 4000 USD investment pays off. Unless I'm doing it for the sport, building my own LLM rig is not financially viable.

This is without saying that company clients of Anthropic or OpenAI will not have the upfront money to get a RTX 3090 for each and every employee. Much better to sign a deal with the LLM providers and get cheaper token price with a sales person.