I expect it will never change. In two years if there is a local option as good as GPT-5 there will be a much better cloud option and you'll have the same tradeoffs to make.
For other use-cases, like translations or basic queries, there's a "good enough".
And I expect that over time the gap will narrow. Sure, it's likely that commercially-built LLMs will be a step ahead of the open models, but -- just to make up numbers -- say today the commercially-built ones are 50% better. I could see that narrowing to 5% or something like that, after some number of years have passed. Maybe 5% is a reasonable trade-off for some people to make, depending on what they care about.
Also consider that OpenAI, Anthropic, et al. are all burning through VC money like nobody's business. That money isn't going to last forever. Maybe at some point Anthropic's Pro plan becomes $100/mo, and Max becomes $500-$1000/mo. Building and maintaining your own hardware, and settling for the not-quite-the-best models might be very much worth it.
But the foundation models will eventually hit a limit, and the open-source ecosystem, which trails by around a year or two, will catch up.
At the moment there appears to be ~no demand for older models, even models that people praised just a few months ago. I suspect until AGI/ASI is reached or progress plateaus, that will continue be the case.
And my phone uses a tiny, tiny amount of power, comparatively, to do so.
CPU extensions and other improvements will make AI a simple, tiny task. Many of the improvements will come from robotics.
We have long entered an era where computing is becoming more expensive and power hungry, we're just lucky regular computer usage has largely plateaued at a level where the already obtained performance is good enough.
But major leaps are a lot more costly these days.
However, small models are continuing to improve at the same time that large RAM capacity computing hardware is becoming cheaper. These two will eventually intersect at a point where local performance is good enough and fast enough.
But the open db got good enough that you need to justify not using them with specific reasons why.
That seems at least as likely an outcome for models as they continue to improve infinitely into the stars.
Seems plausible the same goes for AI.
That was in 2021. Today if you ask who my friend is, it tells you that he is an elephant, without even doing a web search.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people are doing this with more serious things.
I remember Uber and AirBnB used to seem like unbelievably good deals, for example. That stopped eventually.
And Uber is still big but about 30% of the time in places I go to, in Europe, it's just another website/app to call local taxis from (medallion and all). And I'm fairly sure locals generally just use the website/app of the local company, directly, and Uber is just a frontend for foreigners unfamiliar with that.