i think the real gap isnt at the high end tho. theres a whole segment of people who just want to run a 7-8b model locally for personal use without dealing with cloud APIs or sending their data somewhere. you dont need 4 GPUs for that, a jetson or even a mini pc with decent RAM handles it fine. the $12k+ market feels like it's chasing a different customer than the one who actually cares about offline/private AI
just want to run a 7-8b model locally
This is already solved by running LM Studio on a normal computer.
Ollama or llama.cpp are also common alternatives. But a 8B model isn't going to have much real-world knowledge or be highly reliable for agentic workloads, so it makes sense that people will want more than that.
the compute density is insane. but giving a 70B model actual write access locally for agentic workloads is a massive liability. they still hallucinate too much. raw compute without strict state control is basically just a blast radius waiting to happen.