absolutely, however this doesn’t mean we should abandon local. i can’t remember who, but someone in the ai nuts and bolts arena said “smaller local models is where the exciting stuff is happening right now. it’s the area real fast progression is happening.” and it seems to be true. new big models aren’t making near the leaps smaller models are.
it’s so important we keep moving forward on running locally for the same reason it was important for us to use open standards when building the internet. if we hadn’t we’d all be connected through aol with 10 hours/month allowed internet usage and termed in through a sun workstation renting cpu cycles from some mainframe company at like “you’ve got 10,000 cpu cycles left on your monthly plan, please deposit $500 for 5,000 more.”
while all of this this is before my time, i’ve heard and read so many horror stories about how people could only connect through dumb terminals to “you wouldn’t believe it, computers then were the size of buildings” 1000 miles away and had to sign up for workload timeslots. make no mistake, this is the future these companies want, they want us to rent everything and own nothing.
