A lot of model debates are really disguised system design debates.
Local models win when
- privacy matters more than absolute ceiling performance
- latency needs to be predictable
- costs compound under repeat usage
- you need control over inference behavior and deployment shape
Frontier APIs win when
- output quality still dominates the constraint set
- you are iterating fast and do not want infra drag
- your use case benefits from multimodal capabilities and tool ecosystems that move quickly
The mistake is making this ideological. In practice, most real systems end up hybrid.