Their latest open models are pretty competitive with other open models, and some innovation around the smaller sizes (2-4 GB).
They're helping close to the distance to realistic quality inference on phones and other smaller devices.
They're helping close to the distance to realistic quality inference on phones and other smaller devices.
If someone monopolized OS marketshare for mid- to low-priced devices, that does seem like it would be a useful research focus.
Whereas offering the same with compute-inefficiency cloud inference would be economically unviable at scale.
Free on-device Google premium closed-source models* = free Google Maps 2.0
* As long as you ship Google Apps and Play Services