Yes, frontier models from the labs are a step ahead and likely will always be, but we've already crossed levels of "good enough for X" with local models. This is analogous to the fact that my iPhone 17 is technically superior to my iPhone 8, but my outcomes for text messaging are no better.

I've invested heavily in local inference. For me, it's a mixture privacy, control, stability, cognitive security.

Privacy - my agents can work on tax docs, personal letters, etc.

Control - I do inference steering with some projects: constraining which token can be generated next at any point in time. Not possible with API endpoints.

Stability - I had many bad experiences with frontier labs' inference quality shifting within the same day, likely due to quantization due to system load. Worse, they retire models, update their own system prompts, etc. They're not stable.

Cognitive Security - This has become more important as I rely more on my agents for performing administrative work. This is intermixed with the Control/Stability concerns, but the focus is on whether I can trust it to do what I intended it to do, and that it's acting on my instructions, rather than the labs'.

I just "invested heavily" (relatively modest, but heavy for me) in a PC for local inference. The RAM was painful. Anyway, for my focused programming tasks the 30B models are plenty good enough.