The work going into local models seems to be targeting lower RAM/VRAM which will definately help.

For example Gemma 4 32B, which you can run on an off-the-shelf laptop, is around the same or even higher intelligence level as the SOTA models from 2 years ago (e.g. gpt-4o). Probably by the time memory prices come down we will have something as smart as Opus 4.7 that can be run locally.

Bigger models of course have more embedded knowledge, but just knowing that they should make a tool call to do a web search can bypass a lot of that.