Its a convenience thing. You can run a whole lot of stuff locally from wikipedia to social media/email/video servers whatever. Most people with a full time job and 2 kids dont do it cause who has time and energy to patch and maintain the ever growing complexity of this stuff. These systems will keep growing complex. That also means more bugs. Age old tradeoff between freedom and convenience.
You can run mediawiki at home but you won't have wikipedia. You can run a video server but you won't have all the movies that Netfix has. A local model is actually the real thing.
Thanks I didn't know about kiwix, but, let's consider the fact that a wiki, or netflix movies are cheap or free, while AI is actually quite expensive at least for now, and i'm not sure if it's because of real costs or to justify the valuation.
So there is a bigger incentive to run locally something that's gonna get you $20 or $100 worth of bills to OpenAI than to mirror something that is actually free.
Example: In the past there was a whole market for sound cards, if you wanted your computer to have any "multimedia" capabilities you needed to get a sound blaster but now everybody assumes a computer will produce sound, and it's basically for free as all chips have it. Now sound interfaces are still a thing but only for audiophiles who are esoteric enough like me to believe that it's worth to have that extra hi-fi quality.
What I think it could happen, is that eventually AI will be part of all the chips, just like soundcards. And there will be people who will buy specialized AI from companies that perhaps are not OpenAI or Anthropic but second-generation sleepers who watched the carnage in the market and decided to enter when it was reasonable.
This could be Apple, or Nvidia or something new. They're just waiting for the others to do the research and introduce the taste for it to the masses, just like sound blaster made us fall in love with high fidelity sound in our computers.
