Baking the base models on to ROM makes a lot of economic sense.
Less so for consumers though, because it'd mean the phone is out of date in 3 months when a better model comes along.
Less so for consumers though, because it'd mean the phone is out of date in 3 months when a better model comes along.
Now you sell the same phone with higher price tag.
At some point the music will stop on training bigger models, and when that happens it will make sense to have ROM weights (or 100% analog circuits given how noise-resistant LLMs are), but we'll know when that is because the investment bubble funding the training of new models will have burst.
The rate of change to the models has to be slower than the hardware roll-out to be worth a hardware solution. If "good enough" happens before then, that just means the user gets a software solution.
The rate of change by itself doesn’t tell you the whole story because of costs and diminishing returns. So what if your model is twice as good if it’s 10x the cost and it saves you 1ms? Everything else about phones reached “good enough for a phone” levels in years, and then got minimal generational improvements.
The reason we don't do this in general (any more) is that for long chains between input and output it has been much too difficult to avoid accumulation of errors. LLMs happen to be extremely resilient to errors like this, which is also why we can use e.g. 4-bit weights.
Ofc if the model has some critical bugs that’s another matter.
Maybe baking in a model that is "certified" to have some unconditioned truths + rest is pulled from external models/store could make sense. But AFAIK that doesn't exist and I'm not sure it can possibly be made. Perhaps society as a whole at least can work on an open corpus of training data, but I'm not holding my breath on this.
Nope. And not only not a decade ago, right now.
If you have an Android or iPhone, you can give it clear and easy to understand instructions that Gemma 4 could complete[1] if it had tool calls on it, and that 100.00% of Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Kimi, you name it, could understand and all complete if they had the access.
The phones will fail to complete it. I just tried Siri. I said "hey Siri", waited for Siri to come up, and then I asked one of the exact sentences you replied to: "what's the weather this afternoon?" It thought for around 20 seconds, and said "Something went wrong. Please try again."[2]
I have Wifi, I have mobile Internet, I have free storage space, I have up to date software. What went wrong is that phones have never properly connected agents, not ten years ago, not last year, not this year, and probably not next year.
But don't settle for what Google could do in 1999 by hotlinking the keyword "weather" in any query to the weather being shown in the results.
Tell your phone (any phone): "Please call back the last number that called me that is not an unlisted number, regardless of who it came from."
0 out of any phone will complete that today, tomorrow, a year from now, five years from now, ever, because phone makers are not going to let them do that.
Meanwhile, 100% of all frontier agents could complete it if they had tool calls on the phone. Which they don't, and won't ever, thanks to the duopoly.
Okay, that's a bit dismissive, I would love to be wrong!
[1] after any voice recognition to text - which does work really well on both Android and iPhone! [2] screenshot: https://ibb.co/21rtDnfV
Can you say this to it: "Hey Siri [wait for it to come up] - please send me an email with the temperature right now so I have it for my records." and see if it can complete the task without any backtalk or misunderstanding, and if you get exactly what you asked for. (It's a really clear request.) Should be 1 statement, no clarification, conversation, random search results, ("Here's what I found!"), etc.
A normal frontier model can do that - or Siri can do it if it is properly connected to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, or any other frontier AI - but previously it was never properly connected.
If it can do this task, I might have to look into this again. It counts as a success if it sends yourself any email with the current temperature and you actually get it (it can include whatever other text in the email), and a failure if it talks back, says "here's what I found", says it can't, asks you any question, sends you an email that doesn't actually contain the current temperature, just reads you the temperature and then asks if you want it to send an email, etc. Should be 1 shot.
let me know if it works!
Subject: Current Temperature Body: The current temperature is 27°C in <my city>.
Once they started seeing useful (if niche) functionality as a cost center, there wasn't really a world in which these could usefully exist. Their big bet now seems to be that LLMs will lead them to profitability - but whether that's from increased data harvesting, cheaper integrations, or because it'll be useful enough to charge subscription fees, I couldn't tell you.
What Siri is missing is more logical solutions and answers for recipes, etc (still suck even with chatgpt integration).
"Hey Siri, what's the weather in <nearby town with a generic name> tomorrow" and it gave me a town with the same name ~800 miles from me.
That's the only thing the normie consumer cares for really.