This is actually what happens.

I run my word processing software on my apple 2 (a total joke of a computer) instead of running it on the WANG.

I run my book keeping software on visicalc instead of the IBM.

I run my simulation software on my IBM PC (I even paid for the 8087!) instead of the VAX.

Moore's law has, at least so far, allowed the pioneers with toy computers to grow their toys big enough to solve "big boy" problems after some time has allowed the toy computers to be faster and the pioneers have scaled their crappy home-grown solution to solve their 60% of the problem that was originally solved by some enormous complex system.

Eventually the toy infrastructure gets expensive and solves 90-120% of the "big iron" problem space, but it also grows to cost as much as the big iron solution, but then a new generation of toy software and toy systems emerges to disrupt the "big iron" systems.

See also http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.htm...

It's a huge difference. If you had AI sufficiently good running locally on a phone, you could devise workflows for things like basic digital hygiene, technical assistance, and tedious tasks like inbox management, image sorting, device updates, and so on. Privacy and security gets a big boost past some local competence threshold, and we're nearly there.

Make the local AI competent enough to do good image generation and editing, realtime voice and music generation, handle agentic tasks with a framework like Hermes, and you can take your AI places to do tasks in contexts that are inaccessible to or inappropriate for cloud.

Frontier big platform models will be the best, but there's a level of "good enough" for local uses that we're already seeing flourish, and "good enough" for the average joe is almost here.

It's a little different because cloud and blogs didn't actively get in the way of your home compute. To wit, the various cost spikes for hardware.

People -- WANT -- this technology on their home devices and (apparently?) the providers of this tech don't seem to be running a profit so they probably don't want the maintenance tail on their side either.

I think it's a bit different. Inevitable that this becomes a household-run thing? Not likely.

Running an LLM locally is theoretically viable. Running your blog on your laptop is never viable (unless you hook it up like a server). One just requires compute while the other a stable network.

The primary feature of a blog or any website is that it is available around the clock, that is the primary feature of cloud: around on the clock computer and network that scales on demand.

The primary feature of "AI" is to process information and reason with a natural language interface at speed, the primary feature of AI bigboys is to provide the machinery that runs the "models".

See the difference?

More like implode proprietary blog hosting platforms and replace them with commodity VMs that can be used for blog hosting, among other things

Wouldn't arcade cabinets vs home video game consoles be a more apt comparison?

You have to consider that the enshittification factor is much higher now than in the cloud-for-free age.