Title says it all. Why spend so much effort finetuning and serving models locally when any closed-source model will do the same for cheaper in the long run. Is it a philosophical argument? (As in freedom vs free beer) Or are there practical cases where a local model does better.
Where I’m coming from is the requirement of a copilot, primarily for code but maybe for automating personal tasks as well, and wondering whether to put down the $20/mo for GPT4 or roll out my own personal assistant and run it locally (have an M2 max, compute wouldn’t be a huge issue)
If you are cool just using the command line, ollama is great and easy to use.
Otherwise, you could download LMStudio app on Mac, then download a model using the search feature, then you can start chatting. Models from TheBloke are good. You will probably need to try a few models (GGML format most likely). Mistral 7B or llama2 7B is a good starting place IMO.