I'm happy to be wrong about that; I was under the impression that DeepSpeech was available as a data set for training, but not as a trained system in and of itself.

My impression is that a lot of the hardware costs from modern AI comes from training and updating the model.

So (speaking as a non-expert) it doesn't seem like there's any technological problem with running a model locally on a private network -- you just need access to the model and you need someone else to generate it. And that's exactly what Google isn't providing. It's like they found a way to turn modern AI into even more of a black box.

At the point where I'm OK consuming someone else's model and not being able to control how it gets updated, then I'm probably also OK with using a compressed, static model and needing to occasionally download and deploy new versions.