Every AI subscription is a ticking time bomb for the frontier provider; within a few years we will be running local models as good as today’s frontier models with almost no cost burden. The floor will fall out of the enterprise market for all the frontier companies.
The economics of local AI just doesn’t make sense. A model like Opus is - supposedly - something like 5T parameters, which is likely something like 3TB of GPU memory. Local models never reach the % utilization that cloud providers have (80%+), and they’re always going to be much better than local models for this reason.
Running local applications is less efficient than thin clients to the cloud generally, not just in LLMs. The trick is that you can get to the point where it's effective enough, and affordable enough, that the control and availability factors become dominant.