I’d disagree with this. As local models and compute improve, I can definitely see something like this becoming doable offline in the next decades. In the meantime, at the very least, I would never use something like this unless I could bring my own API/cloud provider so that my data isn’t being handled by the vendor. Also teleoperation is a huge no go for me.

so just a quick counterpoint ---> I played around with qwen 2.5 4B recently locally. An older model and a tiny model.

Tested this model with optimized harness and it was good enough that it was able to complete (sometimes) a full job application flow for given json user data.

All that to say, I think that there is a strong possibility that we will even just with llm tech, develop it enough that local efficient models are entirely sufficient on their own to be able to drive basic robot 'harness'.

But we almost certainly will not be seeing that as the product from the corporations because they desperately want and need that data about you, for the same reason many tv (lcd/etc) companies make more money from 'ads' then from selling the tvs.

Believe it or not, I'm actually capable of operating completely offline. So there you have it.