Counter position (not sure it's better than yours): what are the chances that device makers would actually offer seriously local, and not just something that does work in airplane mode, but then still connects to their cloud later, if not for post-sale monetization then at least for features providing better brand lock-in? I mean just look at how well the market for TV sets that don't try to shove "services" down buyers' throats is developing...

But sure, making money with standalone "local first is our headline feature" will be incredibly hard against those, no doubt about that. In light of the limited quality of what local models can achieve, the privacy bonus just won't compel many to pay. But that only means that this "morning with Claude" you are suggesting might be just the right amount of investment for the result you'd realistically expect. But is that so bad? I'd argue the reverse: bundling up the low hanging fruit but not by some hobbyist who will lose interest two weeks on but by a company big enough the keep it going while small enough to not be a VC furnace that will inevitably turn on users once the runway runs out (*), that's an opportunity to fill a niche few others can. Valuable for users who don't want to roll their own deployment of open source models (can't, or unwilling to commit to keeping them up to date, assuming that Ente does keep that ball rolling), and also valuable for the company of the investment actually is so low that it pays by raising awareness for their other products that apparently do earn them money.

(*) I was googling around a little wondering if they actually are as close to bootstrapped as they seem on the surface, and yes, that's supposedly the core idea [0], but despite that they also took 100 kUSD in "non-diluting" (basically a gift then?) from Mozilla with the explicit goal "to promote independent AI and machine learning" [1]. So not a CEO whim but following up to a promise made earlier. If they actually did avoid spending all that money on a one-off but went smaller planning to keep it current for a longer time horizon, I'd congratulate them on an excellent choice.

[0] https://ente.com/blog/5-years-of-ente/

[1] https://ente.io/blog/mozilla-builders/

The hn discussion for [1] seems to be completely missing the point, that Mozilla program isn't about funding an image host (yeah, I'd also prefer if Mozilla focused on the Browser and perhaps Thunderbird, but the foundation is what it is): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681666

Ensu – Ente’s Local LLM app