[littlestymaar]

That's why local models are important.

Of course they aren't alternative to the current frontier model, and as such you cannot easily jump from the later to the former, but they aren't that far behind either, for coding Qwen3.5-122B is comparable to what Sonnet was less than a year ago.

So assuming the trend continues, if you can stop following the latest release and stick with what you're already using for 6 or 9 months, you'll be able to liberate yourself from the dependency to a Cloud provider.

Personally I think the freedom is worth it.

[David_Mendoza]

The cloud dependency problem goes deeper than the model layer though. Even if you run inference locally, your digital identity — your context, your applications, your behavioral history, is still custodied by whoever controls your OS.

Local models solve one layer of the dependency stack, but the custody assumption underneath it remains intact. That's the harder problem.