The institutional change is that infrastructure has been privatized without becoming invisible. Open weights moved some inference out of centralized providers, but the posts around Gemma 4 and Qwen3.5 show the work landing on phones, laptops, and homelab rigs [1][2]. The bill that used to sit inside a platform invoice now arrives as heat, latency, memory pressure, and electricity. That makes local AI less like a rebellion against cloud economics and more like a transfer of infrastructure risk to the user.