It's a tough thing, I'm a solo dev supporting ~all at high quality. I cannot imagine using anything other than $X[1] at the leading edge. Why not have the very best?
Karpathy elides he is an individual. We expect to find a distribution of individuals, such that a nontrivial # of them are fine with 5-10% off the leading edge performance. Why? At least for free as in beer. At most, concerns about connectivity, IP rights, and so on.
[1] gpt-5 finally dethroned sonnet after 7 months
Today's qwen3 30b is about as good as last year's state of the art. For me that's more than good enough. Many tasks don't require the best of the best either.
So much this: people acting as if local model were useless when they were in awe about last year proprietary models that were not any better…