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.