reliability and self reliance is worth a lot to most. Heck, you could be the best in the world at what you do, but if you're unreliable you wont find stable employment. So, not having some amoral shady company errode model quality out from under you constantly is also worth a lot more than simple cost balancing calculations can capture.

I'm getting really sick of the constant rot and "magic breakthrough" cycle, so im going full local, at expense on paper but being able to trust something which I need to understand the reliability of is priceless.

I like predictable. I'll take slightly less capable over unreliably capable, since with reliable i can calibrate my expectations and learn what aspects of my workflows to entrust and trust it will work. You simply cannot do that with models you don't control and in my experience they will all errode after the initual marketing wave passes, likely you eventually get fed heavily quantized versions and are expected to accept degraded service when what convinced you to pay was a far superior product. No such issues with local.

Thanks. If I may ask a follow-up: how did you decide what amount of compute to buy?

Picked a local model I was happy with, then figured out what is required to get it running at acceptable tok/s, where I settled on a amd "ai" variant NUC with 96gb vram avaliable to gpu. This arrived recently, and qwen3.8 27b runs fast enough for me on that, with full context, and plenty of paralell streams. That said i'm in a fortunate position, so also got an rtx6000 to continue rlhf based finetunes in data I amass over the years from myself and friendly highly knowledgable/skilled friends, since that is in essence what makes fronteir labs models better, so i figure, why shouldnt we benefit from our expertise and input direcerly, instead of having it sold back to me by some amoral company? If that eventuates in a model that genuinly beats current, obviously we'd give back to the community by releasing that.