It's very hard for me to understand the frame a mind of the author of an article like this. I can't understand people seeing Anthropic's revenue go from $9B to $30B from January to April and seeing GPT 5.6(?) solve a longstanding open math problem and thinking that we've hit the top. I don't think superhuman intelligence that obsoletes humans is imminent, but it's clear that each model from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic is more useful than the last. They literally can't find enough GPUs to serve their customers; that's why the prices are so high. Apple, mentioned in the article, is now using cloud LLMs based on Gemini.

Local LLMs are awesome. Hopefully the way things go, in a few years everyone will have a local LLM that works for them, rather the bigcorp that made it. But it feels like cope to assert that cloud LLMs are dead.

Right now, the cloud-LLMs have big and IMO growing advantages. Cloud-LLMs are better at utilizing GPUs, economies of scale drive their serving cost down, they have the advantage in ability to monetize (like SaaS has the advantage over desktop apps), and they'll always have the most capable models. The question is whether the advantages of local LLMs in terms of personalization and data soveignity is worth it to consumers. And we saw what choice consumers made last time around, choosing centralized SaaS companies rather than a more distributed web.