Why point 2 is a problem? They can run locally if there is a chip that can do that and offload to cloud if not, and if there is a connection fast enough to transfer the data both ways in a reasonable time. I'm thinking about photo and (especially) video processing. Translating would probably be OK even on show connections. Furthermore, IMHO shooting photos and videos in the middle of nowhere with no connection is a more common use case than translating something there.
Not disagreeing with you, but when running a product and R&D team implementing and maintaining both routes is a hard sell. From a business and resource-allocation perspective there's not enough ROI, I'd rather have those resources work on improving power management.
Also, in the end the whole additional effort would be made for a device which is not well-connected to the internet, a tough acknowledgement for a company whose whole business is based on people connected to the internet.
For Qualcomm the story is different: They want to sell the chipset to companies who then build/buy local models to include in their firmware package, just like they're used to for the past 10 years...
Because you have to maintain two code paths that are very different.
One of them gets a huge budget (pixel design) and has to rewrite major ML models. Very expensive. All for a small amount of users.
The other code path has most of your users, and can use whatever the R&D team throws together. And works for every customer, and can be easily bug-fixed if issues arise.
When you’re Google with Billions of users, your long-tail use cases are all common. You have to think about what that behavior looks like regardless.
