I’m quite optimistic about the long-term future of local LLMs for privacy and cost control reasons. An LLM running on my own hardware, even if it’s not a laptop but a home server, is one where I don’t need to worry about token limits, token fees, privacy, and “rug-pulling” from the vendor.

In the short term, the big challenge is being able to afford hardware that can run a ~30B model. Last month I got to experiment with LLMs on a NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation as a visiting researcher during my summer break. I see the power of local LLMs for agentic coding; they’re no Claude, but they are quite useful. I wish I had gotten into local LLMs before hardware has gotten prohibitively expensive and in some cases unavailable; Apple discontinued certain Mac Minis and Mac Studios with high amounts of RAM due to the RAM shortage.

Hopefully high RAM prices don’t become a new normal, though the next year or two doesn’t look good.