There is at least one startup working on a local solution (I forget their name), but my understanding is that it's still technically inferior - for example it c

There is at least one startup working on a local solution (I forget their name), but my understanding is that it's still technically inferior - for example it can only support very small vocabularies. The bottleneck is simply raw gpu compute power available. I completely agree with you that the technical gap might be caused in part by incentives from cloud companies. Why invest in researching something that makes your core business less valuable?