> They're helping close to the distance to realistic quality inference on phones and other smaller devices.

If someone monopolized OS marketshare for mid- to low-priced devices, that does seem like it would be a useful research focus.

Whereas offering the same with compute-inefficiency cloud inference would be economically unviable at scale.

Free on-device Google premium closed-source models* = free Google Maps 2.0

* As long as you ship Google Apps and Play Services