> I never understood why an AI meeting notetaker needed sota LLMs and subscriptions

I’m the opposite: If something is expected to accurately summarize business content, I want to use the best possible model for it.

The difference between a quantized local model that can run on the average laptop and the latest models from Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI is still very significant.

For summarizing context, it's not that far off. I've summarized notes using Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Qwen3 8b, and there a difference, but not huge.