Comment by nozzlegear

That's true, but assumes that saving money is the only reason to go local (or that someone doesn't already have the hardware to do it – a Mac with 64gb can run most 27B models). By using a local LLM, you can guarantee that your data stays private; that your workflow always works for you and won't randomly change or stop working at the whims of an upstream provider; and that you can evolve your tools or swap in new models whenever you want, without some weird Effective Altruist culter in SF writing a dissertation on the model's supposed mood first.