For the internet to be democratizing it needed PCs first. Before that computing was like LLMs: the mainframe era. You either had access to an institution with a mainframe or you were luckily able to get a thin client to a mainframe (the early time-sharing systems.) Even after PCs were invented, for decades mainframes were inarguably better than PCs. Mainframes and thin clients were even some of the earliest computer networks.

I am optimistic that local models will catch up and hit the same pareto-optimal point. At some point your OS will ship with a local model, your system will have access to some Intelligence APIs, and that's that. Linux and BSDs will probably ship with an open-weights model. I may be wrong, but this is my hope.

If you're interested in a taste of that future try the Gemma3 class of models. While I haven't tried agentic coding with them yet, I find them more than good enough for day-to-day use.

I have been keenly watching for locally-run AIs. This includes the price point for running 70b models, such as the one recently announced by Switzerland. I've also been looking at what it would take to run these in much smaller compute, such as microcontrollers.

However, fine-tuning may be run locally -- what are you thinking about in terms of training?

"At some point your OS will ship with a local model, your system will have access to some Intelligence APIs, and that's that."

There's a secondary effect that I had not even discussed in detail here. I don't know how to explain it concisely because it requires reframing a lot of things just to be able to see it, let alone to understand it as a problem.

Let me see how concise I can be:

1. There are non-financial capital such as social capital, knowledge capital, political capital, natural capital, etc.

2. The propensity is to convert non-financial capital into financial capital at the expense of the other forms of capital. I think this is the core dynamic driving enshittification (beyond how Cory Doctrow described it when he coined it).

3. While LLMs and AIs can be designed to enhance the human experience, right now, the propensity is to deploy them in a way that does not develop social and knowledge capital for the next generation.