That would negate, at least partially, the "we have 20 datacenters" advantage.
I don’t think they have an ensemble of 8 models. First, this is not elegant. Second, I don’t see how this could be compatible with the streaming output.
I’d guess that GPT4 is around 200B parameters, and it’s trained on a dataset made with love, that goes from Lorem Ipsum to a doctorate degree. Love is all you need ;)
Plus, none of the smaller models are really appreciably close to GPT-4 on most metrics. It's not clear to me you could get there at all with 1.3b models. Maybe somebody gets there someday with 65b models, but then you're far out of the reach of phones.
Also Apple has never gone for high RAM in mobile devices. I could go get 12GB in a brand new phone for $400, and some high end phones have had 16GB since 2020.
So combined, you could do normal app stuff with 2.5GB and 20-25b 3-bit inference with the other 9.5GB.