They don't require really expensive and power-hungry components to run, i.e. a mid-range GPU can run a (4-or-5-bit quantized) 7B model at +50 tokens/second, so

They don't require really expensive and power-hungry components to run, i.e. a mid-range GPU can run a (4-or-5-bit quantized) 7B model at +50 tokens/second, so it's completely feasible to run on a small budget. They are easier to fine-tune, because they are smaller, and you can even just do CPU inference if you really want. There are good OSS implementations like llama.cpp and exllama. And there is a lot of belief that 7B models are not yet tapped out in terms of efficacy, so they will keep improving.