AFAIK some azure services can be run on premises if you're a big enough customer. Don't think GPT APIs are available yet but might in theory be possible in the future. Self hosting a model the size of GPT4 would be insanely difficult and expensive. but might be a workable solution for data sensitive enterprises like Apple, JPM and government orgs.
Microsoft has had two different iterations of on-prem Azure. The TL;DR is that you’d buy a full rack of hardware from them and you could manage it using Azure front end.
The first iteration was a miserable failure. The second was a heavy lift to install: Previous employer was an Azure customer and actually bought the hardware. It then took months to get it installed and working, at which point the appetite for that capability was gone.
1. The value in proprietary software largely lies in the source code, which is not available in on-premises, you are talking about compiled binaries. There is no such thing as "compiled binaries" for neural network weights.
2. License/copyright - Even in the best possible case, there are plenty of jurisdictions that don't care about US copyright and would love to get a hand on those weights.
3. We haven't seen copyright cases around model weights before. If I managed to exfiltrate OpenAIs model weights, I would continue training for a few iterations and then I think it would be quite difficult to prove that I actually have the same model as OpenAI. This is untested, why would they risk it.
4. Running these models requires a ton of resources, vastly beyond the typical onprem deployment - why would Azure invest in making this possible when it really could only impact a very small percentage of companies?
The weights are OAIs lifeblood, I imagine they are very protective of them.
I don’t know … my company (whose revenue is on the same order of magnitude as Apple’s, though granted we’re not in the tech industry) keeps absolutely everything on OneDrive.
I don't think Apple is one of them