Someone in the early '80s could have also said "we do live in this era" in response to someone pointing at an Apple II or original IBM PC and seeing it as something that would ultimately upend the mainframe market entirely.

In fact, we're already further along than that in terms of local AI. I'm currently able to get usable results at 8-10 tokens/sec using open-weight models on my laptop's integrated GPU, running on battery power. A $4,000 DGX Spark (less than what an IBM PC cost at launch in inflation-adjusted dollars) can get 3-5 times the inferencing performance with models 3-5x larger.