It’s completely technically possible to have cloud services where customer data is opaque to the provider. Some of Apple’s services are like this already, for example.

I think there’s a sweet spot currently with munging your data blindly on the server so that your client device battery still lasts all day.

Meanwhile Apple and others push on with making client side models more efficient so that eventually the server costs and complexities go away.

I'd like to think so but the existence of Google and Apple and Microsoft's cloud based photo tools with phone integration suggests that's false.

You could run a pretty good home server on $50 of gear and yet we never saw any real adoption of OwnCloud/NextCloud style products as an alternative to Google Drive/Photos or Apple Cloud.

Why should LLM/Transformers be any different? Especially when you need a proper expensive GPU to run them instead of a Raspberry Pi?

> Most people are ok with slower. An AI that lets you edit a family picture, in say 30 seconds, locally is preferable to one that is instantaneous but requires you to submit that picture to examination/storage/training/sale in someone else's AI ecosystem.

Maybe if you ask them that question, but if you show them two products, they'll definitely prefer the faster one. 30 seconds is a long time to watch a progress bar.