If only we had a technology that didn't hallucinate and reported "I don't know". Then small models would be far more useful. Part of the need for insanely huge LLM models is to get coverage so broad that they don't have to make up stuff.

It would be nice to be able to train a customer service bot on a laptop in a reasonable length of time. But it will screw up badly outside its area of competence, which will happen frequently.