For the longest time, the conversation around local AI models revolved around quality. They were either too slow, too dumb, too small, or too incapable to match what the t**ans over at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are doing with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, respectively. That gap, however, is shrinking a lot faster than most people realize, even though it does exist in some areas. For the most part, though, modern local models have become genuinely impressive, and are capable of writing, summarizing, coding, and reasoning on capable hardware, of course.