You can still run some decent small models on that 8GB of VRAM if you are offloading the context to system memory/swap. Check out Bonsai 27b. You can get the 1bit that will run on your machine and it's actually pretty decent, I was actually shocked. I can run the 2 bit on mine. But it also does in some cases make sense to run the cloud models too. Like I will use Grok for like current event news analysis because it's models are retrained basically daily and it has the X access which helps with market sentiment and breaking news info and such. But I don't pay for it, lol.