Also, an entire family can share one big box that can run a good model. Not an entire household, but an entire family no matter where they live in relation to the box. They could all access it over the internet, or even simply over the telephone. When it becomes another family member/servant, a price tag in the low $10s of thousands seems a lot more reasonable - and this is accessible now.
I could absolutely see local AI taking the place of voicemail/call screening completely. Call me and you get my AI, who will route the call to me if approved, or even choose to service the call itself. If a friend of mine calls who doesn't have $20K to spend on a great AI rig, they would certainly have permission to steal otherwise wasted cycles from mine. An answering machine isn't much different than an issue tracker, and some of those are 97% AIs having perfectly intelligible conversations with each other, and 3% humans being eagerly serviced by AI.
The old objection was "this is so hard to set up, nobody wants to run a server!" Now it can set itself up.
tldr; you don't have to rent from some data center. You can get high utilization out of a local box. This 1) puts a hard ceiling on what a data center can charge, and 2) they won't be able to compete on privacy, which locally can be complete.
I could absolutely see local AI taking the place of voicemail/call screening completely. Call me and you get my AI, who will route the call to me if approved, or even choose to service the call itself. If a friend of mine calls who doesn't have $20K to spend on a great AI rig, they would certainly have permission to steal otherwise wasted cycles from mine. An answering machine isn't much different than an issue tracker, and some of those are 97% AIs having perfectly intelligible conversations with each other, and 3% humans being eagerly serviced by AI.
The old objection was "this is so hard to set up, nobody wants to run a server!" Now it can set itself up.
tldr; you don't have to rent from some data center. You can get high utilization out of a local box. This 1) puts a hard ceiling on what a data center can charge, and 2) they won't be able to compete on privacy, which locally can be complete.