I think the trajectory is more important than the snapshot in time. A year or two ago if you wanted to run things locally you were either running toy models, or somehow had a super-computing cluster. Now it's just high end 'normal' hardware. At current trends, we'll be running frontiers on a plain old computer within a few years.

All the snapshot does is set a pricepoint. Most 'normal' people I've talked to about LLMs have expressed some concerns about privacy/control from LLM cloud companies. So this is the cost it takes to opt out - actually substantially less since a 4090 is also enough to run Qwen 3.8. MSRP there is $1600. Retail price is a bit higher but trending down quickly. Once this bubble pops, this sort of hardware will probably be available on the cheap.

Anyhow, so yeah - a 'normal' person isn't going to have a $15k laptop or a $1600 video card (that retails upwards of $2k realistically) because they had no reason to. Now they do. Of course in a year or two, those prices will likely have plummeted precipitously, so perhaps they still have no reason unless they're just particularly impatient.