The quality of local models is still abysmal compared to commercial SOTA models. You're not going to run something like Gemini or Claude locally. I have some "serious" hardware with 128G of VRAM and the results are still laughable. If I moved up to 512G, it still wouldn't be enough. You need serious hardware to get both quality and speed. If I can get "quality" at a couple tokens a second, it's not worth bothering.
They are getting better, but that doesn't mean they're good.
Good by what standard? Compared to SOTA today? No they're not. But they are better than the SOTA in 2020, and likely 2023.
We have a magical pseudo-thinking machine that we can run locally completely under our control, and instead the goal posts have moved to "but it's not as fast as the proprietary could".
My comparison was today's local AI to today's SOTA commercial AI. Both have improved, no argument.
It's more cost effective for someone to pay $20 to $100 month for a Claude subscription compared to buying a 512 gig Mac Studio for $10K. We won't discuss the cost of the NVidia rig.
I mess around with local AI all the time. It's a fun hobby, but the quality is still night and day.