No, local models will not win

Every time a new open-weight AI model is released, people say that local models are the future. Why spend billions of dollars building out datacenters when everyone will just be able to run AI models on their laptops or phones? I think this idea is doomed. No matter how strong open-weight models get, most inference will always happen in AI datacenters. Local models are too weak to be widely used Local models are never going to be as powerful. I think this point should be obvious: all of the current frontier models (closed and open-weights) are far too big to run on anything but a full GPU cluster in a datacenter. Of course, smaller models are getting more intelligent over time. In a year you might be able to run something about as strong as GPT-5.6-Sol on your laptop. But by then, you’ll think of GPT-5.6-Sol as too weak to be useful. Many people deny this last point, but it’s true: almost everyone’s revealed preference is to use the strongest available model in their price range. If…