I’m excited about this part, but also kinda worried that the ecosystem would move in the wrong direction, becoming more locked down over time.
There’s already some on-device AI, especially on Google phones. Right now it’s just used for the simple and lightweight stuff, like Google Translate (remember when that used to be a hard problem?), scam detection, improving your selfies, and proofreading your emails.
But today’s phones (and most consumer computers) don’t really have the hardware horsepower to run the bigger, better models that do the complex reasoning and better image and video generation and such. It’s also quite cost-prohibitive, in the present day, to put such capabilities into consumer devices that might only need them a few minutes out of the day, as opposed to data centers that can share them between thousands of users all day. That said, though, the major hardware makers are starting to add more and more consumer AI chips into their home user devices, and maybe economies of scale will eventually make those affordable too, if RAM ever comes back down again.
The software is also kinda lacking and scattered, with Nvidia’s chips mostly working the best on their own software and Apple and Google each making their own frameworks. The phones also limit how other apps can interact with the onboard AI… I tried to build a SMS political spam filter for Anyone else? The political junk texts blitz? (which is a trivially easy thing to do now), but the Android operating system doesn’t let other apps receive RCS messages anymore (Google’s own proprietary version of iMessage). To their credit, at least you can swap out Gemini for Claude as the default assistant, for now. But generally speaking, the phones’ security models depend on not trusting their own user, whereas computers and LLMs typically assume the user has full permissions to modify whatever they want (which is what makes the agentic harnesses so powerful on computers). So unless they’re willing to relax some of those restrictions to give onboard AIs more access, they’re always gonna be a bit handicapped. Maybe some of the open-source Linux phones will start giving more direct access to AI chips.
I largely agree with you otherwise.
But of course, if we could fully predict the AI future, we’d both be trillionaires by now 