I think the race is actually between locally optimized rigs with extremely strict context management, and the rest.

it'll all be centralized models justifying their capability against local inference in, maybe 3 years or less

once we have a bit more memory fab capacity and the insane bottomless investment in AI giants realizes there is a bottom, local hardware will catch up with model performance to the extent that centralized inference will be downgraded to special cases or for orgs that find it cheaper than buying expensive hardware

but really most power users are going to have 1 TB unified RAM and local models that will do well enough

for light office use you can still have a cheap laptop and a claude subscription