People are getting pretty tired of AI. Just about every tech company is shilling "AI", without actually selling anything which is useful for most consumers. On the other hand, just about everyone is being drowned in AI-generated garbage. To a lot of people, "on-device inference capability" is identical to "FlarzBuz engine to power Garbage Generation".
Also, I'd disagree with it going to change the economics behind it. Sure, offloading the hardware and power cost of inference on the consumer is going to make it cheaper for the AI companies, but they're still going to have to spend an absolute fortune on training. And how are they going to sell it if it runs on your device? The tech industry has been trying to push everything away from on-device code in order to sell subscription-based cloud services! Who's going to pay a subscription or per-query fee simply for the right to run a pretty mediocre app?
Also, I'd disagree with it going to change the economics behind it. Sure, offloading the hardware and power cost of inference on the consumer is going to make it cheaper for the AI companies, but they're still going to have to spend an absolute fortune on training. And how are they going to sell it if it runs on your device? The tech industry has been trying to push everything away from on-device code in order to sell subscription-based cloud services! Who's going to pay a subscription or per-query fee simply for the right to run a pretty mediocre app?