Why not? There are a lot of tasks that a local model can do cheaper.

In a workplace environment I don't think "cheaper" is necessarily the thing to optimize for. Subscription models save you a lot of time (and money) by getting things right faster, solving bigger problems, etc. A cheaper model just consumes more human time.

But with a local model with essentially free tokens, I can set it to work on tasks in the background without having to worry about any usage limits. Deferring simple bug fix tickets or other low complexity to an essentially unattended local model works just fine. And if the result occasionally fails review, it still didn't burn paid usage credits.

A local model tops 60 tokens/s max. Running it on the background means not being able to use on the task you are working on. When working on local hardware you cannot do concurrent requests. In deepseek for example you can have 100 agents running each getting at 120 tokens/s easily. In local models you are limited by your own infrastructure.

I do concurrent requests just fine and they have no noticeable performance impact. Not all local hardware is equal.

With cloud agents I also process stuff overnight. But my gpu is limited. If I want to OCR a high number of documents or vectorize data, I can't run an LLM at the same time. I use remote models and use my compute for running commands on my desktop machine.

You seem really upset that people do things differently than you. May I suggest trying Tetris to help you feel better? https://play.tetris.com

This only holds if you do not value your time meaningfully.

Today this is absolutely true. Local models have gotten very good, but they aren't there yet. The cost of a Max subscription or even AI pricing is overwhelmingly worth it for most users, even if you ignore the enormous capital costs of running the competitive models locally.

But the in a million years bit, even taken as rhetorical bombast, is of course silly. The difference between local models and the frontier models is ever shrinking. Extrapolating out and eventually, sooner rather than later, the difference is going to be a wash.

Unless all of the vendors stop progressing open local models, the future is clearly there. It's why I think AI is important and valuable, but also the current leaders have a dubious financial path forward.

It's an easily reproducible technology, clearly...

He's pretending like there's any magic to claude or the others, there isn't

Enjoy renting everything you depend on!

I sure do. And 2-4 years in the future when this insanity is over I will buy and own local llm hardware. But certainly not now with those prices and speed of progress that obsoletes everything in a year or two.

I made some assumptions and was foolish. Sadly not a new tale. But still in context I do think for every You there are several other Not Yous who are planning infrastructure who aren’t keeping an eye on the local escape hatch.