Why would anyone need more than 640Kb of memory?
Exactly the point though. In the 640KB days there was no subscription to ever increasing compute resources as an alternative.
Well, there kinda was - most computing then was done on mainframes. Personal / Micro computers were seen as a hobby or toy that didn't need any "serious" amounts of memory. And then they ate the world and mainframes became sidelined into a specific niche only used by large institutions because legacy.
I can totally see the same happening here; on-device LLMs are a toy, and then they eat the world and everyone has their own personal LLM running on their own device and the cloud LLMs are a niche used by large institutions.
The difference is computers post text terminal are latency and throughput dependent to the user. LLMs are not particularly.
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