Why do people host LLMs at home when processing the same amount of data from the internet to train their LLM will never be even a little bit as efficient as sending a paid prompt to some high quality official model?
inb4 privacy concerns or a proof of concept
this is out of discussion, I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one. I don’t care about anything else than quality of generated answers
Because you don’t train your self-hosted LLM.
As a result you only pay for the electricity of computing your tokens (your request), this can be especially reasonable if the same machine also does local game streaming and or transcoding, and thus already has the requirements to host a LLM.
If you don’t have rather unreasonable means, your local LLM is just very much more limited in parameters (size), and will not be as good as other, much larger models.
Privacy, Ethics and personal interest usually are the largest drivers from what I can tell.