the local AI landscape for the average enthusiast

please don't sell your house to get enough compute to run GLM-5.2 in your garage.

the goal of "open source AI" is NOT the same as having local AI.

your data, privacy, owning your own compute and hardware and all separate from the goal of an "open AGI".

open research and experiments are the only way to democratize AI and actually move the landscape forward. (thank you open chinese labs, western inference providers and @PrimeIntellect)

sure, it is fun to own a bunch of compute and run these almost trillion parameter models on your own hardware but it is by no means local or in the interest of the average enthusiast, these discussions around selfhosting GLM-5.2 are necessary in order for everyone to understand that is a pipedream with current compute cost and availability and it will only get worse from here.

i believe the average person should have atleast 32gigs of somewhat fast memory so they can run the frontier of locally available models, these models are extremely good and efficient and very useful, but until it gets easier to automatically have these models running on your hardware in a natural way plugging into existing workflows and productivity apps, adoption will not increase.

until then, these 30b param sized models can be served very efficiently by these large companies trying to make useful productive features available in their products. nvidia will make it happen. it is in their absolute best interest to sell more generally available compute.

use your inference providers instead of renting compute for LLM inference, get a claude/codex subscription and figure out places where open weighted LLMs fit in your workloads. get things up and running and find a balance of productive automation so you and your work can be more focused on actually unsolved problems.

we are past the takeoff for open source, the landscape looks good, you do not need to FOMO on buying and renting compute. get a 3090/4090 for local experiments, maybe two if you're really confident you'll find a place for them in your homelab, if not. you can absolutely just get a good frontier subscription like claude/codex as mentioned before and reap the benefits of every single ecosystem, put $5 on openrouter and try the 30b param models out to see their quality/efficacy on your tasks before you splurge on thousands of dollars in compute.

rent an rtx pro 6000 if you're really that itchy and atleast try and get something working before you splurge $11k+ out of fomo to get one in your hands.

the future is bright, ladies and gents, but you have to keep your families fed while you prep for the singularity.