Comment by nilkn

Your statements are a couple months out of date. The space is evolving rapidly. It's definitely not a cost-efficient approach today, but models like Kimi K2.5 can be run on dual 512GB Mac Studios with performance rivaling (though still not fully matching) cloud frontier models. That's $20k of hardware, so it's certainly not going to be common today. My point is more about the trend: hardware to run serious models is starting to become more affordable, and open weight models are slowly but surely closing the gap with cloud models. Project this forward in time a couple years, and I think you'll be surprised how many folks will be interested in running AI locally outside of cloud environments. This trajectory will also intersect and interact with the trajectory of advertising and other monetization methods with cloud-based vendors necessarily becoming far more aggressive over time.