This. People are perfectly able to install and run their own PostgreSQL databases, or Kafka brokers. The software is free and doesn't need much resources. Sti

This. People are perfectly able to install and run their own PostgreSQL databases, or Kafka brokers. The software is free and doesn't need much resources. Still, MSFT is selling its PostgreSQL-as-a-service and Not-quite-Kafka-but-similar-enough-as-a-service thing to a shit-ton of corporations which maybe once had the capability to host this for themselves, but have lost it while they migrated all of their stuff to the cloud. And they do so at a hefty premium. The same thing will happen to LLMs. Anyone will be able to run an own, custom-trained variant of sufficiently capable models on their own hardware. But most corporations will not do it. Just like they don't operate their own Kafka broker. They will instead pay a lot for MSFTs cloud service offering, which of course comes with the crucial promise that their data is safe and secured and handled in a way that is compliant with all privacy laws. Which of course isn't true, but that doesn't matter, the promise is what matters. And currently businesses largely believe that promise, which is why the MSFT/Azure connection is indeed the actual "moat" of OpenAI.