I make an important distinction between cloud services and local AI. My lifetime spending on cloud AI is probably less than $500, and I don't intend to spend any more. But I've already dropped $2.5k on new hardware for local inference, and could easily see myself spending more in the future. In fact, I'm regularly browsing for deals. I would also be open to paying for local models, if there was a way to make that compatible with fully open models.

AI is so important, I want to have it under my control. Even if I have to pay a penalty in terms of capabilities.