Equation 8 · Small and On-Device AI in 2035: Scenarios and Falsifiers
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Symbol P
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Symbol t
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Three things hold across every cell. First, a cloud tier of some kind survives in three of the four scenarios and only fully disappears from everyday use in the one — The Rails Meet — where both axes resolve toward the optimistic pole simultaneously; even Apple’s own architecture, arguably the most aggressive current bet on the device, keeps a server tier specifically because “more sophisticated requests” need it [ 11 ] . Second, which specific technique wins inside each axis’s optimistic pole — a successor to today’s LoRA-style adapters, a regularization method that finally tames catastrophic forgetting, a new NPU architecture rather than an incremental TOPS increase — is a narrower, more…
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Three things hold across every cell. First, a cloud tier of some kind survives in three of the four scenarios and only fully disappears from everyday use in the one — The Rails Meet — where both axes resolve toward the optimistic pole simultaneously; even Apple’s own architecture, arguably the most aggressive current bet on the device, keeps a server tier specifically because “more sophisticated requests” need it [ 11 ] . Second, which specific technique wins inside each axis’s optimistic pole — a successor to today’s LoRA-style adapters, a regularization method that finally tames catastrophic forgetting, a new NPU architecture rather than an incremental TOPS increase — is a narrower, more replaceable engineering detail than the axis itself; the axis is compatible with any winner. Third, none of the four requires a plateau in frontier cloud capability. A cloud-frontier model can keep improving on the hardest tasks while on-device capability keeps closing the gap on everyday ones, because P(t) in the equation above is a share of everyday tasks, not a claim about the ceiling.
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