Stability.ai has been cloud training, but open source releasing their diffusion based models for image generation.

Somebody built that model into an iOS app that runs (slowly) on your local device.

I agree most AI companies don’t benefit, though.

The problem with even this model is depending on the kindness and transparency of the companies. What’s to stop a company like stability from continuing to release such a model open source, but poisoning the training set with ad-sponsored copy? The original stable diffusion model took a month of 256 A100 gpus to train ($600,000).

Well I have benefit from running AI on my device, so surely a company will appear in time to take my money.

Not to mention there's some cost cutting involved if you offload computing to the customer's device.