I see no moral problems paying OpenAI for GPT Plus. it helps a lot in development. Their free speech-to-text 'whisper' is really good too. I'm going to use it + small local GPT for voice control.

> I can currently run some scary smart and fast LLMs on a 5 year old laptop with no GPU.

And, something useful or just playing? I played with local models, and will keep playing, training, experimenting. It's interesting, but not a solution, not yet.