Yeah this is basically Metaverse or NFTs but with a slightly more plausible use case so that it will drag out far longer before corporations quietly pretend it never happened.
It will not be wasted or forgotten. The cat's out of the bag. You can run it locally on your machine. It can summarize text for you, it can help you write boilerplate code, it can help you find that file with that thing that you don't quite remember, it can create a poem about your left nut. The tech already has proven useful, it's about where you use it.
Yeah, but the drive for profits will poison the concept. I agree with you that there is a lot of FOSS alternative, but the layman will probably not understand how to host their own LLM.