unless you’re ok with what you get out of today’s models on dedicated consumer GPUs

This is all I use, mostly for quickly putting together personal software and doing linux stuff, it doesn’t feel limiting and is already really powerful. A lot of the stuff those models struggle with can be overcome by giving better context and more specific instructions, and that can be automated, so they should become more useful as harness software advances, independently of advancements in the models themselves. Maybe I have a limited perspective because I just haven’t tried the frontier models, but developing a dependence on services run by malevolent companies that obviously intend to use that dependence as leverage is deeply unappealing, and I’m not sure what they could offer to make that seem worth it on top of what I can already do with my own computer.