Consider also that right now LLMs run slowly enough you can watch them think. I've seen a demo of an LLM running at an absurdly high speed and it reminds me of when I moved from a 2400 baud modem to a 14.4 - BBS screens that I could watch draw were all of a sudden nigh-interactive. Faster-than-realtime video generation is also coming, and will also continue to require huge hardware for a long while yet.

I love local models - I have a machine at home that runs a few for me and it's a lot of fun - but for the time being they are not super trustworthy on tool calls and staying on script. Another year or so might change all that!