May happen, but I suspect not in the way implied by that question.

Hardware is still improving, though not as fast as it used to; it's very plausible that even the current largest open weights models will run on affordable PCs and laptops in 5 years, and high-end smartphones in 7.

I don't know how big the SOTA close-weights models are, that may come later.

But: to the extent that a model that runs on your phone can do your job, your employer will ask "why are we paying you so much?" and now you can't afford the phone.

Even if the SOTA is always running ahead of local models, Claude Code could cost 1500 times as much and still have the average American business asking "So why did we hire a junior? You say the juniors learn when we train them, I don't care, let some other company do that and we only hire mid-tier and up now."

(Threshold is less than 1500 elsewhere, I just happened to have recently seen the average US pay for junior-grade software developers, $85k*, which is 350x cheaper, and my own observation that they're not only junior quality but also much faster to output than a junior).

* but also note while looking for a citation the search results made claims varying from $55k to $97.7k

They would fall behind in the world just like people from developing and poor countries do today.

It's not that expensive unless you run millions of tokens through an agent. For use cases where you actually read all the input and output by yourself (i.e. an actual conversation), it is insanely cheap.

What do you think the "true cost" is?