AI

Lately I have been feeling more and more strongly that one of the most overrated things in AI is the release of a new model itself. Not long ago, every new version triggered the same reaction: how much smarter is it, how much stronger is it, how high will it climb on the charts. That reflex is starting to wear out. It is not that models no longer matter. It is that users, especially developers, have become much more practical. Fine, you shipped an upgrade. But the real question now is: so what? ...

The shift happened fast. Not long ago, the AI conversation was dominated by one question: whose cloud model is stronger? Now a growing number of products are pushing back toward the desktop, and very specifically toward the Mac desktop. Put Gemini on Mac, Ollama v0.19, and Google AI Edge Gallery side by side, and this no longer looks like coincidence. It looks like a market signal. My take is simple: what users actually want is not just a stronger model, but a lower-friction experience. Model quality matters, obviously. But if using the model means opening another tab, waiting on the cloud, wiring tools together, juggling prompts, and constantly losing context, even a great model starts to feel annoying. And once a tool feels annoying, it rarely becomes a habit. ...