GPT-5, the world best model just 1 year ago, is today inferior to Qwen3.6 27B that you can run on your desktop
(thelemmy.club)
Something I think would help accelerate this is educating people on how to run them. But maybe that comes after a long period of stability, since models leapfrog each other every few months now.
Like, first, which model do I run? Depending on your hardware, you'll get 50 answers and random links to huggingface. Are the things they are linking models from companies or organizations you hear about? Maybe, or maybe they're some strange distillation or uncensored/abliterated model, or some custom tweak that nobody can explain without using a bunch of nonsensical sounding terms.
Second, what are they actually capable of? What other apps can they link to and how do you link them? The second part is not always easy. A friend recently started using them to assist with organizing his life and thoughts by connecting it to Obsidian and Zotero. He has ADHD and says it helps him immensely in actually getting those ideas down, if not developing them further. I never would have considered this kind of workflow.
Third, what software do I use? LM Studio? Ollama? Ramalama? How come some connect to my IDE, but not others? What is rocm and why do some support it and some not? Do I need that?
These are rhetorical questions, but it's honestly a swamp trying to get clear answers to them online and probably the biggest barrier to getting people to use these local models at the moment.