Been in the Mac ecosystem since 2008, love it, but there is, and always has been, a tendency to talk about inevitabilities from scaling bespoke, extremely expensive configurations, and with LLMs, there's heavy eliding of what the user experience is, beyond noting response generation speed in tokens/s.
They run on a laptop, yes - you might squeeze up to 10 token/sec out of a kinda sorta GPT-4 if you paid $5K plus for an Apple laptop in the last 18 months.
And that's after you spent 2 minutes watching 1000 token* prompt prefill at 10 tokens/sec.
Usually it'd be obvious this'd trickle down, things always do, right?
But...Apple infamously has been stuck on 8GB of RAM in even $1500 base models for years. I have 0 idea why, but my intuition is RAM was ~doubling capacity at same cost every 3 years till early 2010s, then it mostly stalled out post 2015.
And regardless of any of the above, this absolutely melts your battery. Like, your 16 hr battery life becomes 40 minutes, no exaggeration.
I don't know why prefill (loading in your prompt) is so slow for local LLMs, but it is. I assume if you have a bunch of servers there's some caching you can do that works across all prompts.
I expect the local LLM community to be roughly the same size it is today 5 years from now.
* ~3 pages / ~750 words; what I expect is a conservative average for prompt size when coding