That the source code for unbreakable encryption fits onto a T-shirt made it clear to the US government that it was a "speech" issue, and also made it clear that it was in any practical sense unstoppable.
That big models can't fit onto most person devices at present is indeed likely to be a temporary state of affairs, however it does also mean that the political aspect is very different — the senators and members of parliament can't look at the thing and notice that, even if the symbols are arcane and mysterious beyond their education, it's fundamentally quite short and simple.
And, of course, if they're planning legislation, they can easily say "no phones with ${feature} > ${threshold}", which they've already done on various compute hardware over the years, even if the thresholds seem quaint today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2ThMmgQdpE
Politicians don't care if all of us here think they look silly.
> 2) Claiming that the benefit of people being able to run the models locally is only 5% is absurd. The privacy benefit of not sending your sensitive data to a third party is worth more than that by itself, much less setting up some huge institutions to have an oligopoly over the technology and subject everyone to all the abuses inherent in uncompetitive markets.
This seems a surprising claim, given the popularity of cloud compute, Cloudfare, third-party tracking cookies, DropBox, Slack/MS Teams, Gmail, and web apps run by third parties such as Google Docs, JIRA, Miro, etc.
There are certainly cases where people benefit from local models. The observation of all these non-local examples is part of why I think that benefit is about 5% — though perhaps this is merely sample bias on my part?
> But from the perspective of those institutions they want to classify those benefits as costs, so they try to come up with some malarkey about how they need to gatekeep for "safety" because so they can control you is unsympathetic.
They've been saying this "malarkey" since before they had products to be marketed.