For me, it's not even cost necessarily. If they decide to change the product they offer, the old one is gone. I refuse to use anything for personal use that's not at least _available_ as model weights.

Not even that way, given that the price is still highly subsidized by investors and circular deals.

For what do you use the 4 local H100s then?

Not all tasks require a frontier model

what is "FOTA"

I get perfectly acceptable results from a Strix Halo PC the size of a shoebox, man. An APU that uses ~150w, has 0 discrete GPUs, and a bill of $0/m. What's more, it doesn't go down every week, limit use, or change the terms at a whim.

I'll burn/discard 'frontier' tokens (at work) only because they're mandated and they foot the bill. I'd rather resell them; meet the asinine requirement from $EMPLOYER, provide cover for outsourcing to my equipment, and get a return for the hassle.

TLDR: perhaps you're holding it wrong or haven't tried the latest, as we so often hear. That's a lot of GPU for not much utility.

It's like chairs!

Thanks for all the logical fallacies in one comment.

No. It means eventually existing users will be affected too. These companies are deeply in the red.

People will insist otherwise, but I haven't seen anything close to sonnet 4.6 that can be run locally.

Not really. Qwen 3.5 and Gemma and a couple of others are quite good though, and the quants are _very_ runnable on a good gpu.

I’m sorry but that’s just dumb. An LLM is a tool. Your brain is not a substitute for an LLM in the same way your fingers are not a substitute for a wrench.

The year is 2026 and if you are using your brain on chore work like one-off scripts, refactoring, boilerplate test code, then you are wasting time and money and I don’t want to work with you.

Local models are fine for this and can do it in a fraction of the time your brain will take to even get bootstrapped