[einr]

Right now you can get 20TB hard drives for cheap and setup your own NAS, but way more people spend money every month on Dropbox/iCloud/onedrive - people value convenience and accessibility over “owning” the product.

Yes, this is a convenience argument, not a technical one. It's not that your PC doesn't have or could have more than enough storage -- it likely does -- it's that there are other factors that make you use Dropbox.

So now the question becomes: do we not believe that personal devices will ever become good enough to run a "good enough" LLM (technical barrier), or do we believe that other factors will make it seem less desirable to do so (social/financial/legal barrier)?

I think there's a very decent chance that the latter will be true, but the original argument was a technical one -- that good-enough LLMs will always require so much compute that you wouldn't want to run one locally even if you could.

If the personal computer of the 80s was good enough, why’s nobody still using one?

What people want to do changes with time, and therefore your PC XT will no longer hack it in the modern workplace, but the point is that from the point that a personal computer of any kind was good enough, people kept using personal computers. The parallel argument here would be that if there is a plateau where LLM improvement slows and converges with ability to run something good enough on consumer hardware, why would people not then just keep running those good enough models on their hardware? The models would get better with time, sure, but so would the hardware running them.

[alex43578]

The original point that I was making was never purely a technical one. Performance, economics, convenience, and business trends all play a part in what I think will happen.

Even if LLM improvement slows, it’ll probably result in the same treadmill effect we see in other software.

Consider MS Office, Adobe Creative (Cloud), or just about any pro level software. The older versions aren’t really used, for various reasons, including performance, features, compatibility, etc. Why would LLMs, which seem to be on an even faster trajectory than conventional software, be any different? Users will want to continue upgrading, and in the case of AI, that’ll mean continuing to access the latest cloud model.

No doubt that someone can run gpt-oss-120b five years from now on device, but outside of privacy, why would they when you can get a faster, smarter answer (for free, likely) from a service?