> Just my opinion as a FORMER senior software dev (disabled now).

I'm not sure what this means. Why would being disabled stop you being a senior software developer? I've known blind people who were great devs so I'm really not sure what disability would stop you working if you wanted to.

Edit: by which I mean, you might have chosen to retire but the way you put it doesn't sound like that.

Maybe you mean it'd be cheaper for companies to host centralized internal(ly trained) models...

That seems to me more likely, more efficient to manage and more cost effective than individual laptop-local models.

IMO, domain specific training is one of the areas I think LLMs can really shine.

> purchase laptops with decent hardware specs

> It costs nothing

Seems like it does cost something?

Quite, the typical 5 year depreciation on personal computing means a top-of-the-line $5k laptop works out to a ~$80/month spend... but it's on something you'd already spend for an employee

$2k / 5 years is ~$30/mo, and you'll get a better experience spending another $25/mo on one of the AI services (or with enough people a small pile of H100s)

Same here. I already have the computer for work, so marginally, it costs nothing and it meets 90 percent of my LLM needs. Here comes the down vote!

Still waiting for laptop able to run R1 locally...

Can you expand on this?

Electricity is not free. If you do the math, online LLMs are much cheaper. And this is before considering capabilities/speed.

They're cheaper right now because they're operating at a loss. At some point, the bill will come due.

Netflix used to be $8/month for as many streams and password-shares as you wanted for a catalog that met your media consumption needs. It was a great deal back then. But then the bill came due.

Online LLM companies are positioning themselves to do the same bait-and-switch techbro BS we've seen over the last 15+ years.

Fundamentally it will always be cheaper to run LLMs in the cloud, because of batching.

Unless somehow magically you'll have the need to run 1000 different prompts at the exact same time to also benefit from it locally.

This is even without considering cloud GPUs which are much more efficient than local ones, especially from old hardware.

Yes they'll be cheaper to run, but will they be cheaper buy as a service?

Because sooner or later these companies will be expected to produce eye-watering ROI to justify the risk of these moonshot investments and they won't be doing that by selling at cost.

Will they be cheaper to buy? Yes.

You are effectively just buying compute with AI.

From a simple correlational extrapolation compute has only gotten more cheaper over time. Massively so actually.

From a more reasoned causal extrapolation hardware companies historically compete to bring the price of compute down. For AI this is extremely aggressive I might add. HotChips 2024 and 2025 had so much AI coverage. Nvidia is in an arms race with so many companies.

All over the last few years we have literally only ever seen AI get cheaper for the same level or better. No one is releasing worse and more expensive AI right now.

Literally just a few days ago Deepseek halved the price of V3.2.

AI expenses have grown but that's because human's are extremely cognitively greedy. We value our time far more than compute efficiency.

You don't seriously believe that last few years have been sustainable? The market is in a bubble, companies are falling over themselves offering clinically insane deals and taking enormous losses to build market share (people are allowed to spend ten(s) of thousands of dollars in credits on their $200/mo subscriptions with no realistic expectation of customer loyalty).

What happens when investors start demanding their moonshot returns?

They didn't invest trillions to provide you with a service at break-even prices for the next 20 years. They'll want to 100x their investment, how do you think they're going to do that?