>but when you factor in the performance of the models you have access to, and the cost of running them on-demand in a cloud, it's really just a fun hobby instead of a viable strategy to benefit your life.

Its because people are thinking too linearly about this, equating model size with usability.

Without going into too much detail because this may be a viable business plan for me, but I have had very good success with Gemma QAT model that runs quite well on a 3090 wrapped up in a very custom agent format that goes beyond simple prompt->response use. It can do things that even the full size large language models fail to do.