You missed the entire point of local AI
1. Data Privacy
2. Censorship control
3. Cost
The prospect of unlimited, private, uncensored, tokens far outweighs the relatively small fixed upfront cost.
I wouldn't expect a former meta/Microsoft employee to understand.
i still don’t understand the “local AI is free” point of view
it literally costs thousands of dollars to get started on anything useful, a small data center worth of cost and complexity to do something near frontier
if you sum up all the money spent buying hardware and paying power bill and your time spent fiddling with it, it’s almost decades worth of consumer subscription from frontier labs which give much better intelligence at much larger concurrent throughput
the only reasonable explanation for doing full-on local AI seems:
1. it’s fun
2. it’s cool
3. you really hate the labs
i do think we can look at it in another way - for those who already bought a capable computer, use the idle gpu capacity to do some secondary tasks that don’t require frontier intelligence while you continue to rely on cloud models for primary usage
did i miss anything? genuinely curious if there’s a sound argument