Hardware is slower to design and manufacture than we expect as software people.

What I think we’ll see is: people will realize some things that suck in the current first-generation of laptop NPUs. The next generation of that hardware will get better as a result. The software should generally get better and lighter. We’re currently at step -.5 here, because ~nobody has bought these laptops yet! This will happen in a couple years.

Meanwhile, eventually the cloud LLM hosts will run out of investors money to subsidize our use of their computers. They’ll have to actually start charging enough to make a profit. On top of what local LLM folks have to pay, the cloud folks will have to pay:

* Their investors

* Their security folks

* The disposal costs for all those obsolete NVIDIA cards

Plus the remote LLM companies will have the fundamental disadvantage that your helpful buddy that you use as a psychologist in a pinch is also reporting all your darkest fears to Microsoft or whoever. Or your dev tools might be recycling all the work you thought you were doing for your job, back into their training set. And might be turned off. It just seems wildly unappealing.