That is completely discounting future capabilities and new use cases. Sure in 10 years you will have current SOTA locally, but in no way is it obvious we are anywhere near the limit of marginal value from improved capability

Unless you're a developer or doing complicated research you do not need much to use an LLM at home with consumer-grade hardware.

I'm editing photos with 32GB of DDR4 RAM at 3200mhz alongside a 3050 with a nearly decade-old mobo and ryzen 5800XT and at most? It takes 30 seconds and that's allowing the gpu to use my actual RAM as 'fallback' memory.

There are photoshop filters -now- that take longer than that before the LLM craze even began. Hell; I can train a lora in an hour or two.

This obsession with "more specs more data faster and faster" isn't going to win; it already isn't winning.

Deal with it or get wrecked.