> [local, but for] extremely niche or higher intelligence tasks

Access to a centralized copy of the web/literature/media, scraped and indexed/integrated, seems another non-local center of gravity. Versus a local model's last minute reaching out to "manually" search and browse.

Also mass parallelism for large ensembles. Perhaps unless/until we get those local models as 10k+ tok/s chips. Local can follow frontier because frontier is still sort of "expensive rack local". If STOA becomes massive burst-parallel ensembles, that following may get harder.