I think it’s quite likely that the RAM onboard these devices expands pretty massively, pretty quickly as a direct result of LLMs. Google had already done some

I think it’s quite likely that the RAM onboard these devices expands pretty massively, pretty quickly as a direct result of LLMs. Google had already done some very convincing demos in the last few years well before ChatGPT and GPT-4 captured the popular imagination. Microsoft’s OpenAI deal I would assume will lead to a “Cortana 2.0” (obviously rebranded, probably “Bing for Windows”, “Windows Copilot” or something similar). Google Assistant has been far ahead of Siri for many years longer than that, and they have extensive experience with LLMs. Apple surely realises the position their platforms are in and the risk of being left behind. I’m also not sure the barrier on iPhone is as great as you suggest - it’s obviously constrained in terms of what it can support now but if the RAM on the device doubles a few times over the next few years I can see this being less of an issue. Multiple models (like the Alpaca sets) could be used for devices with different RAM/performance profiles and this could be sold as another metric to upgrade (i.e. iPhone 16 runs Siri-2.0-7b while iPhone 17 runs Siri-2.0-30b - “More than 3x smarter than iPhone 16. The smartest iPhone we’ve ever made.” etc).