$3000 is not that much for hardware (like a refurbished MBP Max with decent amount of RAM), and you'd be surprised how much more useful a thing that is slightly worse than the expensive thing is when you don't have anxiety about token usage.
Ok, from that perspective we are still a few years from when a college student in Portugal can run local OSS models on their own hardware...but we aren't a few decades away from that, at least.
$3000 is not that much for hardware (like a refurbished MBP Max with decent amount of RAM), and you'd be surprised how much more useful a thing that is slightly worse than the expensive thing is when you don't have anxiety about token usage.
$3000 might not be much to a wealthy software engineer in the US, but to, say, a college student in Portugal, it's a big expense.
Open source software democratized software in a huge way.
Ok, from that perspective we are still a few years from when a college student in Portugal can run local OSS models on their own hardware...but we aren't a few decades away from that, at least.