> We haven't had phones running laptop-grade CPUs/GPUs for that long

Agree to disagree, we've had laptop-grade smartphone hardware for longer than we've had LLMs.

Kind of.

We've had solid CPUs for a while, but GPUs have lagged behind (and they're the ones that matter for this particular application). iPhones still lead by a comfortable margin on this front, but have historically been pretty limited on the IO front (only supported USB2 speeds until recently).

The GPUs are perfectly solid. Cheap Android handsets have shipped with Vulkan compliance for almost a decade now; the GPUs are equally-featured to consoles and PCs. The same goes for Apple handsets that run byte-identical Metal Compute Shaders to the Mac. For desktop use they are perfectly amenable. The hardware lacks nothing required for inference or gaming that dGPUs ordinarily support.

And even if you raise the requirements, we still have to contend with cheap CUDA-capable GPUs like the one in the ($300!!!) Nintendo Switch, or the Jetson SOCs. The mobile market has had tons of high-speed/low-power options for a very long time now.

We had LLMs for about 5 minutes or so. Hardly a measure of time for an industry that goes back half a century and then some.