As someone that has pretty powerful desktop that I've been using with local open weight models, people are far exaggerating the quality of them. Some of them are now useful. They don't compare yet to the online models of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. They are still about 18 months behind. I have accomplished useful work with them, like image classification on Gemma4, but they are much much slower, much much more expensive and they don't scale at all.

A $10,000 RTX 6000 Blackwell card will pay for 500 months of Claude or Codex, which is 40 years worth of compute. Obviously they are going to raise their prices, my prediction being to $200-500/month, but that still makes them at least years of compute and they scale very well with more traffic. Single GPUs do not, they are pegged at 100% and good luck getting it to answer multiple queries at the same time.