Another issue where this comes up is high housing costs, which are mostly caused by bad land use laws (and the nearest evil people, landlords, mostly own one or two properties), but people from the New Left era will literally refuse to believe you about this because they can't accept that any bad thing on Earth could not be caused by "corporations".
I'm not arguing that these models hold up against GPT 3.5 and I still use GPT 4 when it matters. But they work and it's more like the difference between Premier League & Division 1, rather than PL & a five-a-side team from Bracknell.
Even a few years ago I could not have imagined this.
Given the pace of work on optimisation and my assumption that the M3 Studio I buy next will probably have 256GB of RAM at much the same power levels as I use now, it seems eminently possible it's a year or two away.
Second, I don't think it will be that long. There are already LLMs as good as GPT-3 running on average laptops and even phones.
In the next couple of years, you'll see:
- Ordinary PCs, tablets, and phones with dedicated AI chips, like TPUs - they'll be more tuned specifically for LLMs
- Mathematical and algorithmic optimizations will make existing LLMs faster on the same hardware
- Newer generations of LLMs will get even more useful with fewer parameters
The combination of all of these means that it's not at all unreasonable to expect that today's top-of-the-line LLM will be running locally on your device within just a couple of years.
Of course, LLMs in the cloud will advance even further, so there will always be a tradeoff, and there will always be demand for cloud AI, depending on the application.
I think AI fundamentally favors centralization. Except for narrow tasks and domains, there's no such thing as "enough" intelligence. For general purpose AI, you'll always want the best and most intelligent model available, which means cloud rather than local.