Local/open-weight models are already incredibly competent. Right now a Mac Studio with 256GB can be found for less than $5000, and an equivalent workstation will likely be 50% cheaper in a year. If anything that price is higher because of the boom, rather than subsidized by a potential bubble. It can run a 8bit quant of GPT-OSS 120B, or 4bit quant of GLM-4.6 using only an extra 100-200W. That energy use comes out to about 100 Joules or 1/4 Wh per query and response, and is already competitive with the power efficiency of even Google's offerings.

I think that people doing work in many professions with these offline tools alone could more than double their productivity compared to their productivity two years ago. Furthermore if the usage was shared in order to lower idle time, such as 20 machines for 100 workers, the initial capital outlay is even lower.

Perhaps investors will not see the returns they expect, but it is difficult to image how even the current state of AI doesn't vastly change the economy. There could be significant business failures among cloud providers and attempts to rapidly increase the cost of admission to closed models, but there's essentially no possibility of productivity regressing to a pre-AI levels.