Well, there kinda was - most computing then was done on mainframes. Personal / Micro computers were seen as a hobby or toy that didn't need any "serious" amounts of memory. And then they ate the world and mainframes became sidelined into a specific niche only used by large institutions because legacy.
I can totally see the same happening here; on-device LLMs are a toy, and then they eat the world and everyone has their own personal LLM running on their own device and the cloud LLMs are a niche used by large institutions.
My point is LLMs aren't more usable if the hardware is in your room versus a few states away. Personal computers still to this day aren't great when the hardware is fully remote.
Agreed. But you couldn't do much on a PC when they launched, at least compared to a mainframe. The hardware was slow, the memory was limited, there was no networking at all, etc. If you wanted to do any actual serious computing, you couldn't do that on a PC. And yet they ate the world.
I can easily see the advantage, even now, of running the LLM locally. As others have said in this topic. I think it'll happen.
