I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

I mean, you can train a model that’s domain-specific that some commercial provider doesn’t have a proprietary model to address. A model can only store so much information, and you can choose to weight that information towards training on what’s important to you. Or providers may just not offer a model in the field that you want to deal with at all.

But I don’t think that, for random individual user who just wants a general-purpose chatbot, he’s going to get better performance out of something self-hosted. Probably it’ll cost more for the hardware, since the hardware isn’t likely to be saturated and probably will be shared.

I think that the top reason for wanting to run an LLM model locally is the one you ruled out: privacy. You aren’t leaking information to someone’s computers.

Some other possible benefits:

• Because you can guarantee access to the computational hardware. If my Internet connection goes down, neither does whatever I’m doing with the LLM.

• Latency isn’t a factor, either from the network or shared computational systems. Right now, I don’t have anything that has much by way of real-time constraints, but I’m confident that applications will exist.