I have a Strix Halo and dual 32GB GPUs in my desktop, that sit idle right now, because the electricity to run them and to cool them in 110F weather Texas is currently experiencing pretty much nulls any savings I might see over getting better models from cloud providers. While I mostly use Claude or Codex with subscriptions for agentic work, for API use DeepSeek has usually been my go to, but now I guess it's GLM 5.3 or the Flash version. And, for security work that Anthropic or OpenAI models are likely to refuse, I've been using Kimi K3 (also via subscription, though their subscription is extremely stingy), but I guess GLM is now the one for that, too.

Anyway, yeah, even at the prices I spent on my local AI stuff (I bought before RAMpocalypse really kicked into gear, so I bought old server GPUs for about $350 each and the Strix Halo for a little over $2k) it was never going to pay for itself; I just like to tinker. But, I can't imagine spending today's prices for hardware for local AI.

When the memory shortage ends, I'll be down to the Apple Store (or, more likely, clicking refresh on the Apple outlet every few days). But, until then, there continues to be a glut of cheap and free models in the cloud that are better than anything I can run locally and they're faster, too.