I Benchmarked Local LLMs on the Laptop I Already Have

My last post was about companies discovering their AI bills and installing caps. A reasonable reaction to that post is the one the local-LLM crowd has been giving all year: stop renting tokens, the open models are good now, just run them on your own machine. The benchmarks backing that advice have a hardware problem. The writeups that measure anything run on Mac Studios or 128GB M5 Max laptops,…