Right now you are right -- even if I ran my local LLM all day, the quality is not nearly as great, and it runs slowly -- so I use the tier one AI subscription services as they are faster and smarter. But that might only be true for a limited amount of time, and a limited number of circumstances.

To borrow your steam engine analogy, if local LLMs get as good as a Toyota Prius, even if OpenAI / Anthropic offer Ferraris, most people will be happy with their Prius as their daily driver.

Similarly, if the big labs start raising prices or cutting usage, you won't be able to use it as much as you want -- whereas a local LLM will run all day every day without costing you any extra money.

So right now you are right, but who knows how long that will last.