alt Hacker NewsA lot of comments here are about the issues with the analysis in OP’s post but much of them are “a distinction without a difference” with respect to the broader conclusion. When we look at purely cost and performance (setting aside privacy) then it’s better for individual devs to pay for hosted then for self hosting. Employers are paying for tokens on the job and most devs are finding the $PREFERRED_PROVIDER’s $20/$100/$200/month subscription sufficient outside of work. Most devs don’t fall in the conditions under which running local models make sense purely on the basis of cost vs performance.
More critically, in practice, setting up local models seems more like a hobby, an educational exercise, or an act of privacy control than it is for cost cutting or productivity.
The model makers, mainframe dream of computer’s isn’t coming back no matter what OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or Microsoft want, there are too many smart tech barbarians at the gate that want in and they’re not going to be satisfied to go back to the computer terminal era.
Personal computers eliminated an earlier terminal era, and most if not all of those companies are gone except for IBM and a few stragglers and they are a shell of their former selves.