nmthornhill

Datapoint from the cheap end of the market: I run local models on a couple of Orange Pi SBCs and a decade-old Optiplex with no GPU. What runs usably on that class of hardware is almost entirely Chinese open weights — Qwen's MoE builds (35B total, ~3B active) are the only thing that gives me acceptable speed on CPU, with Gemma as about the only western exception. I evaluated Kimi too and ruled it out purely on size.

Whatever the strategic picture is at the top, at the bottom of the market "weights you can download and run on hardware you already own" is the whole ballgame, and right now that's mostly Alibaba's to lose.