I think it's almost certain that we'll be moving to running local models as a default in a few years. The quality of small models has been improving at an astonishing rate in my opinion. My favorite example is how Qwen3.6-27B that you can run on a laptop outperforms Qwen3.5-397B which was a flagship model requiring a commercial grade server that was released just in February. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-27b

I fully expect that local models models that are comparable to current frontier models in performance will appear in the near future. Additionally, a lot more can be done with the harness as well, which in my opinion is an under-explored territory right now. For example, ATLAS does some clever tricks in this area https://github.com/itigges22/ATLAS

I started working on my own harness and also notice a significant improvement in model capability with it https://dirge-code.github.io

Apple seems to be one of the few companies to have realized that the future is likely local, and they've been focusing on optimizing hardware for that while everybody else seems to still be stuck in a model as a service paradigm.