On the downside, we have to acknowledge that it is hugely inefficient for everyone to own expensive hardware that has to sit idle most of the time because it would otherwise drain the battery.
Where low latency is not an absolute necessity, the economic pull of the cloud will be tremendous, especially if mobile networks become ubiquitous and fast.
Expensive hardware like millions of 5G/6G modems, stations and fiber optic cables nessesary to send vast quantity of photos and videos to the cloud for analysis?
ait is more expensive to build out bandwidth than to give everyone compute
Also average car is unused 95/% of the time, so by this principle everyone should take a bus
I'm not sure about that. Storing all data on all devices (not just user data but also the pretrained models) means higher data transfer volumes.
On the other hand, syncing data doesn't require low latency and a lot of the data can be transferred over cheaper landline connections rather than mobile towers.
Right now though the default appears to be to upload everything to the cloud right away, regardless of where the data is processed.
And there's also communication and media streaming, which consumes the vast majority of network resources.
Net net I'm not sure whether on-device vs cloud processing will make a big difference for networking costs one way or another.
>Also average car is unused 95/% of the time, so by this principle everyone should take a bus
Yes, and it is hugely inefficient. People who own a car (I don't) are doing it for the benefits it has, not because it's efficient.
That’s exactly right.
And it's not even particularly wasteful to produce. While there are lots of devices the amount of materials in each chip is incredibly small.
In terms of financial cost the material cost is so low that most chip vendors include features in low end chips that are disabled but shipped anyway.
The battery is a key part as well. Doing a lot of on-device processing requires a bigger battery and/or more frequent battery replacements.