I don't know why you are being downloaded. These are precisely the facts that advocates for local models completely ignore.

Local models are absolutely going to be the future for things like simple automation and classification tasks that run occasionally and don't need to rely on internet access.

But for all of the serious stuff where you are doing knowledge work, the models will simply continue to be too big, and too slow to run locally.

The article says:

> Use cloud models only when they’re genuinely necessary.

But at least for me, they're genuinely necessary for 99+% of my LLM usage.

At the end of the day, the constraint here really is efficiency and cost.

Privacy can be ensured with the legal system, the same way that businesses that compete with Google still have no problem storing their data in Google Workspace and Google Cloud. The contractual guarantees of privacy are ironclad, and Google would lose its entire cloud business overnight as its customers fled if it ever violated those contractual agreements (on top of whatever penalties they allow for).