I believe that's actually the main reason to choose a "local" AI.

Good luck getting any of the big players to acknowledge that. >.<

That's exactly why Apple does things like analyze your photo library locally on the phone - for privacy.

Yes, surely this has no relation to their inability to build reliable cloud products ....

It could be both. Perhaps Apple concluded that 1) they're subpar with cloud services and will have difficulty competing, 2) there's a growing need/demand for more privacy and less 'cloud', and 3) Apple's products are already, on the whole, recommended when it comes to privacy.

And based on that they figured privacy was a good thing to aim for. Play to their strengths and differentiate based on that.

I believe many of them do. Google has TensorFlow Lite: https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/googles-tensorflow-lite-br...

Facebook has Cafe2Go. Apple is working on this (and already has bindings optimized to use the ARM vector unit for DNN evaluation).

Running on device, if it can be done with reasonable power, is a win for everyone. Better privacy, better latency, and more robust operation in the face of intermittent connectivity.