Yeah, the truth is avoiding the big players is silly right now. It's not the small models won't eventually work either, we have no idea how they can get compressed in future. Especially with people trying to get the mixture of experts approach working.

Right now, you need the bigger models for good responses, but in a year's time?

So the whole exercise was a bit of a waste of his time, the present target moves too quickly. This isn't a time to be clutching your pearls about running your own models unless you want to do something shady with AI.

And like video streaming was progressed by the porn industry, a lot of people are watching the, um, "thirsty" AI enthusiasts for the big advances in small models.

That's too simplified IMHO. Local models can do a lot. Like sorting texts, annotating images, text-speech, speech-text. It's much cheaper when it works. Software development is not in the list because the quality of output defines the time developers spend prompting and fixing. It's just faster and cheaper to use big model.