Most of these new models release several variants, typically in the 8b, 30b, and 70b range for personal use. YMMV with each, but you usually use the models that

Most of these new models release several variants, typically in the 8b, 30b, and 70b range for personal use. YMMV with each, but you usually use the models that fit your hardware, and the models keep getting better even in the same parameter range. To your point about cloud models, these are really quite cheap these days, especially for inference. If you're just doing conversation or tool use, you're unlikely to spend more than the cost of a local server, and the price per token is a race to the bottom. If you're doing training or processing a ton of documents for RAG setups, you can run these in batches locally overnight and let them take as long as they need, only paying for power. Then you can use cloud services on the resulting model or RAG for quick and cheap inference.