What’s the first task where a local model became “good enough” that you stopped reaching for a hosted one?

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA News

Summary

A community member asks which tasks local AI models have become good enough for that they no longer need hosted models, and which tasks still require the strongest hosted models.

I keep seeing local models discussed in terms of benchmarks, parameter counts, quantization and tokens/sec, but I’m more interested in the point where they become practically useful. For people here who use local models regularly: what was the first real task where you thought, “yeah, I don’t need a hosted model for this anymore”? Coding? Summarizing documents? RAG over personal files? Writing? Agents/tool use? Something completely different? And on the flip side, what tasks still make you reach for the strongest hosted models? I think that gap between “impressive benchmark” and “I actually trust this in my workflow” is probably more interesting than another leaderboard comparison.
Original Article

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