What Local AI Currently Provides

The honest capability picture: local models are excellent for writing assistance, summarization, analysis, coding help, and general-purpose reasoning. They are generally less capable than the very largest frontier cloud models (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet) on the most demanding or specialized tasks. But for most work involving sensitive data — drafting documents, analyzing reports, organizing information, debugging code, brainstorming ideas — local models are competitive with or comparable to cloud models that cost money per use.

The practical tradeoff: you gain complete data control and privacy. You lose some capability on the hardest problems and some convenience (you need to manage the software locally). For many professionals, this tradeoff is worthwhile. For sensitive work, it's the right choice.