You think it always will be? What can the new iPhone chips do locally?
I suspect we're a decade off from being able to generate Veo 3, Seedance, or Kling 2.1 videos directly on our phones.
This is going to require both new compute paradigms and massively more capable hardware. And by that time who knows what we'll be doing in the data center.
Perhaps the demands of generating real time fully explorable worlds will push more investment into local compute for consumers. Robotics will demand tremendous low latency edge compute, and NVidia has already highlighted it as a major growth and investment opportunity.
If that's true, it's a substantial upset to the old paradigms of data and computing.
I still purport that in the future, most applications and screen time will fall into a generative AI bucket: creating media, writing code, watching videos, playing games, searching for information, etc. I wouldn't even be surprised if our personal images and videos get somehow subsumed and "enriched" with AI.
[1] Well, email might fall into a non-generative bucket. There are already tools that purport to both read and write your emails for you. I'm not quite sure what to make of those.
Good thing I'm not talking about data consumption apps then, as I mentioned in my comment above. Local-first apps specifically are not amenable to data consumption purposes so while you are right on the generative AI part, it's unrelated to the topic of this post.
AI photo and video generation is impractical to run locally.
ComfyUI and Flux exist, but they serve a tiny sliver of the market with very expensive gamer GPUs. And if you wanted to cater to that market, you'd have to support dozens of different SKUs and deal with Python dependency hell. And even then, proficient ComfyUI users are spending hours experimenting and waiting for renders - it's really only a tool for niche artists with extreme patience, such as the ones who build shows for the Las Vegas Sphere. Not your average graphics designers and filmmakers.
I've been wanting local apps and local compute for a long time, but AI at the edge is just so immature and underpowered that we might see the next category of apps only being available via the cloud. And I suspect that these apps will start taking over and dominating much of software, especially if they save time.
Previously I'd only want to edit photos and videos locally, but the cloud offerings are just too powerful. Local cannot seriously compete.