maybe, maybe not. I don't want to live in a world where I can't develop software without the support of a massive corporation 3rd party. I think local model inference is going to pick up. Will it ever compete with the clusters? no, but it's good enough for a solo to get work done.

I could be wrong and we could be seeing the ladders being pulled up now, moats being filled with alligators and sharks, and soon we'll have no choice but to choose between providers. I hope we can keep the hacking/tinkering culture alive when we can no longer run things ourselves.

There's no real physical reason to run those LLMs on the end device. LLM interaction is not particularly latency sensitive as in single digit ms like gaming. So if there's no real usability drawback from hopping over the Internet then that's the direction it will go.