Projects like DwarfStar https://github.com/antirez/ds4 really lower the hardware bar a lot so Deepseek 4.1 flash and other mixture of expert models can run on consumer hardware. There are also other inference providers who make their money serving openweight models. Services like OpenRouter make it all too easy to utilize these models. Access to these models isn't hard. The hardware moat is becoming pretty easy to bridge.

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contingencies an hour ago | parent [-]

More concretely DwarfStar M5 128GB Deepseek 4.1 flash 1K tokens @ 29s, 5K tokens + reasoning @ 147s, 10k token prompt @ 463 tokens/s = 22s. Hardware buy-in USD$7K / AUD$8.5K / EUR€6.8K. At typical workloads, ROI is still poor vs. current-era subsidies, but owning hardware is good for privacy/longevity/connectivity independence. Whether you actually consider Apple hardware 'owned' is a valid and thought provoking question.

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onlyrealcuzzo an hour ago | parent [-]

Still gonna take 2-3 years to get DeepSeek V4.1 Flash quality at decent speeds on reasonably priced hardware.

Hardware update cycles are 2-3 years even on the high end, so it's still a ways away before "good enough" and "local" belong in the same sentence for the average person.

And by then, DeepSeek V6 Flash will be too cheap to meter, 5x faster, and 10x better, so... You'd still need to go out of your way.

Most people are spending most of their time on their phones anyway. ..

	▲	contingencies an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In the words of a Scottish comedian, "The average person is Chinese." https://youtu.be/LsEhNMy8svo?t=98