alt Hacker News> The same logic for why self-driving cars can't be cloud based, applies for robots. Something cannot be in the middle of a delicate operation and then "oops!", no network, it just stops.
I don't think you understood my post. The equivalent of self-driving is the movement control I was talking about.
Self-driving cars don't have high level logic, except for route planning. Which often is offloaded to the cloud. An extra 30 milliseconds on understanding your speech is nothing.
> Imagine leasing out idle time on your desktop or even laptop for cash.
You're missing the point. The issue is "how is the thing used" not trying to make identical break points in differing tech. A self driving car cannot have object detection, collision avoidance, human detection offloaded to the cloud. Ever. At all. A network drop can't mean it smashes into things. Or stops unsafely.
The same is true with an android. Imagine it turning on an frying pan, cooking dinner, and then going offline part way through. Or turning on a tap to wash something, and going offline while the sink overflows and destroys the house.
There are myriad of such scenarios, but local compute is absolutely, 100% necessary. Anyone betting the farm on putting network controlled devices into homes for any serious task is going to lose their shirt. Local compute is an absolute requirement, and a few TB of RAM and local compute will be nothing over the scope of this discussion (a few years minimum, just to build and kick off all these new fabs).
By the time these fabs are online, expect most smart phones to have 1TB of RAM and significant llm capable compute (gpu or other custom silicon). I would be astonished if flagship model phones in 2030 weren't sold with 1TB RAM. Note I'm saying flagship, there will be of course economy models as always. Certainly laptops will be sold in multi-TB RAM configs.