Thanks, yes, I meant even ordinary retail PCs, not specialized GPUs. At some point in time in history, SOTA closed models were at a level that compares to todays open models that can run on ordinary hardware.
That’s the conventional view. I think there’s another angle: train a local model to act as an information agent. It could “realize” that, yeah, it’s a small model with limited knowledge, but it knows how to fetch the right data. Then you hook it up to a database and let it do the heavy lifting.