u/unchikuso

We’ve already seen AI transform software development, and other industries are rapidly following suit. There is no doubt that AI demand will be unprecedented.

It won't be long before the mainstream catches on to what we local AI enthusiasts are building on consumer hardware. At our current trajectory, running today's frontier-level capabilities locally on 32GB of VRAM is right around the corner, likely much sooner than any of us anticipated.

Once that happens, the shift will be swift:

• Apple will market Macs as subscription-free Claude replacements.
• Businesses will buy dedicated Nvidia server hardware to power their internal tools and dev teams on-premise (if they aren't already).

While cloud AI will always exist for the average consumer, the demand won't justify the multi-trillion-dollar data center hype currently being built out. Watching these AI IPOs play out will be wild.

Google might be the only tech giant in the AI race to survive the shift cleanly. Anchored by their dominance in search market share, their commitment to open-weight models serves as a brilliant strategic hedge against Chinese open-weight models dominating the local scene. Gemma5 better not disappoint.

I can get $5k for the 5090 and the Mac is $5499 before tax.

The 5090 has a memory bandwidth of 1.8 TB/s while the M5 Ultra is 1.2 TB/s.

Is this a sensible upgrade? Primary use is coding.

I've never experienced anything like this before, coding at these speeds. I literally gasped out loud after the first coding prompt.

I truly have no more use for Claude. I don't think I will be participating in their IPO either.

The usual argument against local LLMs is that the hardware is too expensive.

But virtually all of us running AI on RTX 5090s bought our cards for much less than current retail prices. Many of our GPUs have appreciated in value far more than we've spent on electricity running local models.

This may be the first hobby that pays for itself.