I can see a completely different kind of future where local models that run on commodity software get good enough for what most people need to do. At that point we'd be in a world that Stallman envisioned with every user having full control over what's running on their machine, and being able to build whatever features they want. We already see how it's becoming trivial to reverse engineer complex apps like Photoshop, or to crack PS5 games using LLMs. We are likely end up in a world where closed source is dead because code itself no longer has any value because anybody can copy and reproduce any application trivially.
And we are already starting to get there. Qwen 3.8 27b is comparable in terms of capability to Opus 4.6 which was a frontier model just half a year ago. If Qwen 4 gets to about Opus 5.5 level sometime next year, that's going to be good enough for making vast majority of software that people need. After that it's just a matter of further optimization or hardware getting better so it can run on most computers. But just to reiterate, it's already running on consumer grade hardware, and it can do real work today.