What I get out of it is the ability to hand login credentials to my other computers to manage their updates, bug fixes etc. Eg. After updating my proxmox server, the nvme drive kept dying. Was able to let my local AI in to figure out and fix what was wrong (known issue). A cloud-based AI could've done it too, but I don't want to be sending internal passwords out of my network like that.
Plus, the ability to freely delegate tasks or exploration of things cloud models generally avoid. For example, I draw as a hobby, and when I'm struggling with a pose but can't quite figure out what I'm missing, I pass it into a VLM for advice, but Claude etc get unnecessarily cautious because they interpret an anatomical sketch as a naked person.