alt Hacker NewsThe usefulness of mobile phones was identifiable immediately and it is absolutely not 'post hoc rationalization'. The issue was the cost - once low cost mobile telephones were produced they almost immediately became ubiquitous (see nokia share price from the release of the nokia 6110 onwards for example).
This barrier does not exist for current AI technologies which are being given away free. Minor thought experiment - just how radical would the uptake of mobile phones have been if they were given away free?
It's only low cost for general usage chat users. If you are using it for anything beyond that, you are paying or sitting in a long queue (likely both).
You may just be a little early to the renaissance. What happens when the models we have today run on a mobile device?
The nokia 6110 was released 15 years after the first commercial cell phone.