local models are 3 to 6 months behind SOTA models with the huge benefit of not needing to send all your IP to a shady third party.
If inference cost comes down (as it has been for the last few years) you’ll be able to run today’s SOTA in your laptop by the end of the year.
I would say that is highly unlikely if by SOTA models you are not just referring to coding benchmarks but more general purpose ability and domain-specific knowledge. For example Kimi 2.6, which is comparable to Opus 4.6, is roughly 500+GB large, and I don't see how that would run on consumer hardware anytime soon.
Besides, this is not just about the technical feasibility, but also economically not viable whatsoever. Why should consumer laptops be capable of running such models, when they would be massively underutilized most of the time, when inference providers can produce the same results faster, cheaper and a lot more viable economically?
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