How accessible is local AI actually, and what happens if affordable access to frontier models doesn’t last?

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that this sub and others like it are probably the extreme minority when it comes to this hobby.

Most people, I would think, don’t use or can’t afford one good GPU, let alone multiple GPUs, Mac Studios, Sparks, Strix Halos, etc.

Is the average tech enthusiast or maybe we’ll even say prosumer, actually using local AI? If they are, what are they using?

Everything is backordered right now; The M5 Mac Studios have wait times out from Late Oct all the way to Feb if you really spec them high. Other hardware people are using for local AI seems to be constantly sold out or hard to get to.

Is there really that much demand from individual people? Is some of it artificial scarcity? I have a hard time believing there are enough people buying $5k, $10k, $15k+ setups en masse to cause the kind of chaos we’re seeing on the hardware side of things. Or is it mostly corporations, research groups, etc. buying this stuff up as fast as it comes out?

I just got into this hobby, and one of the reasons I’m interested in local AI is that I’m trying to get away from relying so much on frontier models. I'm just now discovering using Deepseek Flash 4.1 and GLM 5.3 Flash on Openrouter and tinkering with various Qwen 3.8 variations on Unsloth

I don’t think the “free ride” we’re getting right now is going to last forever, either subscription prices are going to go way up, usage limits are going to get insanely tight, or some combination of both. I could easily see access to even decent AI becoming something that’s much more expensive than it is today.

So where do you think the actual inflection point is between local LLMs and frontier/cloud models? At what point does spending money on your own hardware actually make sense instead of just paying for Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc?

For context, I have what is for all intents and purposes an upper-mid-range MBP, an M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM. Pretty powerful by normal laptop standards, but spend enough time in this community though and somehow it feels lower-mid-range, if that.

I’m curious what the actual average setup looks like outside of places like this. Are most people who are even remotely interested in local AI running on hardware they already had? A gaming PC with an 8-16GB GPU? A Mac with 16-24GB? Or is the hardware people talk about in communities like this actually more representative of the average local AI user than I think it is?

I guess what I’m really asking is, what does the future of AI access look like for the average tech enthusiast if cloud gets expensive and local still requires thousands of dollars in hardware?