it’s not as tantalizing as what the AI giants are promising

I lost my job years ago to such con-men selling the idea of "outsource your IT to India, they'll work for only $2 a day!!! Imagine the savings!!!"

And then their IT infrastructure went to shit. And any of us unemployed IT guys who called them out were labeled as racist for pointing out the people they fired us to outsource to were objectively unqualified.

Business owners need to wise up and realize every sales pitch they hear is probably a conman lying to get their money.

For the case of local models, no not at all. Most local models are under a free license (or at least a non-commericial one) and it all runs locally on your hardware, however what you can run and how well depends on your hardware and some software fiddling. Non-local stuff if 100% a ploy to make everyone dependent on big tech even more than they already are, though

I've no interest in trying to run an AI locally on my own equipment but I have set this up for work and it's internet access is monitored and heavily restricted. It has complete intranet access, so that's all the documentation it needs a d it can access read only versions of anything saved in one drive. It can visit websites but it doesn't have the ability to upload anything, it can't even send emails, it can write the email, but a human needs to press send. It seems to be working pretty well, I haven't heard a peep from management since, so I'm guessing they're happy with it.

Qwen 3.8 has a 27b (consumer gpu) model and one that will run in 128gb. deepseek 4.1, glm 5.3 flash, and mimo 2.6 flash also fit in 128-256gb ram, and challenge models for 1-2 months ago.