what's so great about "intelligent" platforms? They're constantly doing something wrong or at least useless.

The level of frustration in trying to get Siri to do something when you can’t use your hands is quite something. I’d like something a bit better.

Almost certainly, if they don't know anything about you they can at best show the median/average outcome.

Some of this can be counteracted with local processing, but that's not really hardware efficient, e.g. you wouldn't consider running a Google instance on everyone's phone.

Breakthroughs in how we do computation could change this, but it would need to be a significant breakthrough, e.g. in homomorphic encryption and differential privacy or huge progress in compute/storage price/density/energy usage.

It's also counter to how our industry's gone, everything's cloud these days, not just because of their insatiable need to feast on our privacy, but also because it's easier to maintain, upgrade, etc. and effectively cuts piracy to nothing.

Eventually, once various forms of fully homomorphic encryption become practical, we can have the best of both worlds.

That being said, using cryptography to protect information will probably always have some (albeit constant) overhead over unprotected computation, so it may be true that these platforms will still be the "least intelligent" even though they are intelligent enough.