> Speaking to your PC gaming analogy, there are render farms for graphics - they're just used for CGI and non-realtime use cases. What there isn't a huge demand for is consumer-grade hardware at datacenter prices.

Right, and that's despite the datacenter hardware being far more powerful and for most people cheaper to use per hour than the TCO of owning your own gaming rig. People still want to own their computer and want to eliminate network connectivity and latency being a factor even when it's generally a worse value prop. You don't see any potential parallels here with local vs hosted AI?

Local models on consumer grade hardware far inferior to buildings full of GPUs can already competently do tool calling. They can already generate tok/sec far beyond reading speed. The hardware isn't serving 100s of requests in parallel. Again, it just doesn't seem far fetched to think that the public will sway away from paying for more subscription services for something that can basically run on what they already own. Hosted frontier models won't go away, they _are_ better at most things, but can all of these companies sustain themselves as businesses if they can't keep encroaching into new areas to seek rent? For the average ChatGPT user, local Apple Intelligence and Gemma 3n basically already have the skills and smarts required, they just need more VRAM, and access to RAG'd world knowledge and access to the network to keep up.