I don’t think OP’s point has anything to do with AI companions.

The big benefit of moving compute to edge devices is to distribute the inference load on the grid. Powering and cooling phones is a lot easier than powering and cooling a datacenter

Torment Nexus sounds fun

Having Scarlett Johansson's voice might not be so bad or even something less robotic.

Unfortunately, one man's dystopia is another's utopia.