Not necessarily kill; but it will slowly push them off the critical path. Local agents can delegate to remote sub agents as needed but should default to local processing for low cost and latency reasons.

I think the notion of a one size fits all model that is a bit like a sports car in the sense that just get the biggest/fastest/best one is overkill; you use bigger models when needed. But they use a lot of resources and cost you a lot. A lot of AI work isn't solving important math or algorithm problems. Or leet coding exercises. Most AI work is mundane plumbing work, summarizing, a bit of light scripting/programming, tool calling, etc. With skills and guard rails, you actually want agents to follow those rather than get too creative. And you want them to work relatively quickly and not overthink things. Latency is important. You can actually use guard rails to decide when to escalate to bigger models and when not to.

Centralized inference is more economically efficient⁰, and should be cheaper for most users once competition squeezes the air out of token prices. It remains very valid for anyone who wants to maintain their privacy, ofc.

0: Because the only way to get cache locality out of a LLM is to batch invocations. A centralized system where the server handles thousands of invocations at the same time only needs a tiny fraction of the total memory throughput as having all of those invocations run locally on different machines would.

Financial gravity will kill them when returns don't match stratospheric expectations.

Unless there are some really, really major shortcuts found in inference, then it's always going to be hard to run a really great model locally. The costs of the PC + electric will usually be crazy compared to a $20/mo Claude sub.

It'd be nice if they do, but I don't really see how. Training these open-weight local LLMs is still insanely expensive and hard to do, even if it's cheaper and faster than what the big corps are doing.

I don't get the financial motive for someone to keep funding these open-weight model training programs other than just purposefully trying to kill the big AI providers.

Some open source models will cross the chasm, some big ai providers will too, and in both case they will have their specific use cases.

This has been my theory for a while: during this autumn Apple will release a version of Apple Intelligence that runs locally and works better than ChatGPT. They will do this because 1) they do not have an offering in AI yet 2) they have amazing hardware that even now almost can pull it off on open models and this will not be possible to replicate on android for a long time (presumably)

This will crush OpenAI.

Note: I am not talking about coding here - it will take a while longer but when it is optimized to the bone and llms output has stabilized, you will be running that too on local hardware. Cost will come down for Claude and friends too but why pay 5 when you can have it for free?

They won't for coding and images, but they will socially. Everyone I know who has invested in home AI use is mostly using it for 'things that might get you banned/limited'.

When Apple gets their shit together.