Also, your local hardware is in no way capable of running the types of models that the cloud providers do, it’s just not economically feasible, and it never will be.
Very much dependent on the situation. For many business tasks, local hardware is good enough. But what a lot of folks overlook when saying these things is that (a) workers do more than run AI models on a piece of hardware, (b) significant computer hardware is already sitting idle outside normal work hours, when it can be running batch jobs, and (c) employees can share local hardware.
It can run open-weight models that are roughly as capable. It's going to be slow unless you're using actual datacenter hardware, but they'll run.
NEVER will be is a pretty big leap. Never is a long time.
> it never will be.
Giving strong “640k is enough for anyone” vibes here.
Depends on what you mean by "economically feasible".
Even very cheap mini-PCs and laptops can run any of the models run by cloud providers, albeit at a much lower speed (i.e. with the weights stored on SSDs).
Whether such a low speed is useful, depends on the application. For something like a coding assistant or bug scanning, an instant response is desirable, but certainly not necessary.