Is local AI is the new Personal Computer boom?

[innerproduct]

There is a clear trend where some people like to use local AI instead of cloud based due to many different reasons. To me this trend reminds me of the Personal Computer revolution where earlier there were just mainframes and mini-computers at the hands of government and large corps. The PC took some of that power and made it available to everyone. No big-brother involved.
If you have tested local LLMs you know they are quite far from frontier models like those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. But not that far of and it is thinkable that personal AI is viable quite soon. And with recent changes in how well the "cheap" services work like the quality regression on Claude 4.7 one wonders how this will play out. I pay 200-400 $ a month for AI services right now and am seriously considering getting a local beast. Clearly I would have to pay 200K for getting something useful right now but tech moves fast.
To me it seems that Apple would be perfectly suited to introduce machines that cater to this need but I get the feeling they have been taken by surprise and are out of sync. Sure the MS with 512 GB RAM and the TB5 RDMA support shows that they are aware of the development but the dropping of MacPro seem an unusually bad move. Instead there could have been "multi-ultra" machines sold at a premium to this segment. Heck people pay a premium for the MS m3u on the second hand market already.

What do you think? Will the need for local AI drive a new desktop boom or will it not be possible due to the immense pressure from hyperscalers etc? Short term? Mid term?

 

[throAU]

Yes.

AI is the biggest thing to happen in computing in my career, which started in the early 1990s and there are MASSIVE developments in smaller models that can be run locally.

For example, Qwen 3.6 which will not run in a 36-48 GB macbook performs like GPT 4.0 which was state of the art and needed 1TB of memory about 12-18 months ago.

 

[JPack]

No, because the current "PC" is the smartphone.

Most people want to keep conversations across devices and have unlimited contextual memory.

 

[Performa460]

There is a clear trend where some people like to use local AI instead of cloud based due to many different reasons. To me this trend reminds me of the Personal Computer revolution where earlier there were just mainframes and mini-computers at the hands of government and large corps. The PC took some of that power and made it available to everyone. No big-brother involved.
If you have tested local LLMs you know they are quite far from frontier models like those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. But not that far of and it is thinkable that personal AI is viable quite soon. And with recent changes in how well the "cheap" services work like the quality regression on Claude 4.7 one wonders how this will play out. I pay 200-400 $ a month for AI services right now and am seriously considering getting a local beast. Clearly I would have to pay 200K for getting something useful right now but tech moves fast.
To me it seems that Apple would be perfectly suited to introduce machines that cater to this need but I get the feeling they have been taken by surprise and are out of sync. Sure the MS with 512 GB RAM and the TB5 RDMA support shows that they are aware of the development but the dropping of MacPro seem an unusually bad move. Instead there could have been "multi-ultra" machines sold at a premium to this segment. Heck people pay a premium for the MS m3u on the second hand market already.

What do you think? Will the need for local AI drive a new desktop boom or will it not be possible due to the immense pressure from hyperscalers etc? Short term? Mid term?

I don't want to think about what they would cost!

That having been said, I wonder how common the need is to run AI locally. I'd say 99% of the people I know wouldn't even know what that means--although many of them have no doubt casually used "AI" on their phones, tablets, and computers.

 

[innerproduct]

Maybe ”need” is not the right phrasing for most. But it should be if anyone cared about freedom , self determination , resilience etc.
Right now such a machine cost too much, but if there were a player that could swallow the upfront costs for a few years in order to own the market…
Cloud and SaaS is so dystopian. My whole being tell me that we all should opt out from services as soon as possible.