AI Is Getting Better. Running It Yourself Is Getting Harder

The article argues that large Mixture-of-Experts models such as DeepSeek-V3 (671B total, 37B active parameters) and Llama 4 Maverick (400B total, 17B active) can be efficient to compute yet costly to host, since all weights must remain available even when only a subset is activated per token. It contends that batching and shared deployments favor large providers, so open weights may become centralized in practice as self-hosting costs rise, and it suggests shared colocated clusters and research into compression, distillation, and expert offloading as responses.