cloud? I feel like that's an example of things going the other way. It used to be every company would have either on on-prem or a colocated server at the nearest network hub - a fairly de-centralized system, and then everything went centralized with cloud platforms.

To be clear, I am not skeptical that it will work this way - I think it's pretty likely llm usage will be come a split of de-centralized and centralized. But I am not very convinced this is a natural law of technology.