[robotresearcher]

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.

[fg137]

This.

If asked to choose between photo editing done within 3s using cloud provider vs an average of 30s using local compute, most consumers will choose the former without hesitation.

Most users' usage is also going to fall nicely in the free tier of a typical freemium pricing model, like ChatGPT today.

People who talk endlessly about local inference have no idea about user workflows and usability.

[dominotw]

dont want to share my pics with "cloud services"

[wolvesechoes]

You may not, but experience shows that most people are just fine sharing the most personal stuff not only with cloud services, but with hole world through anti-social media.