alt Hacker NewsI think it's because there are a lot of people writing articles about the benefits of running local models. I think it's fair to say that there are daily threads on HN singing the praises or local inference. I also see people buying new hardware where the main trigger is ability to run local models.
But the people who want to do local inference are putting some amount of value on privacy that’s not captured by the raw monetary value so just comparing the price is somewhat beside the point, it’s also true that, if you have eg a Mac and you use that as your main computing device then you would have spent money on it anyway, so you can’t even really compare its value to spend on something that’s not general purpose.