There's not much of an alternative: even if compute power gets extraordinarily cheap / models are very optimized, either you have a very, very large hard drive,

There's not much of an alternative: even if compute power gets extraordinarily cheap / models are very optimized, either you have a very, very large hard drive, or you have to use the internet for that. You just can't hope to have a model that is trained to know everything in a smallish file, the weights need to be at least as heavy as an ideally compressed version of all the things it knows (which is of course much less than the huge amount of data it is trained on, mainly due to redundancy, but still a lot) Of course, right now you also need at least 8 super-expensive A100 GPUs and not just your laptop CPU, but maybe that's going to change eventually.