That is only true right now because hundreds of billions of dollars are being burned by these AI companies to try to win market share. If you paid what it actually cost, your comment would likely be very different.
They'll be controlling lights and temperature, they'll be adding calendar reminders that show up on your phone and your fridge. Your phone and devices might sync pictures and videos there instead of the large cloud providers. They'll also be a media server, able to stream and multiplex whatever content you want through the home. They'll also be a VPN endpoint, likely your home router, maybe also a wifi access point.
I think this makes quite a bit of sense. I don't think they'll be ubiquitous, but they could be.
This distributes the power demand where local solar generation can supplement , gives the home user a lot of control, and claims overship of the user data from big tech.
Maybe I'm imagining things but this is what I think is coming.
It's the lmm/data heart of the home. A useful digital tool.
We'll have this massive machine to do "home automation", something that by all rights should be possible with less computing than is deployed in smartwatches today. Yuck...
That's just one piece of the puzzle. If you're running the LLM there's no reason your family's mobile devices couldn't use said home LLM box to save battery life on their devices while maintaining control of their data, searches, photos, files, etc.
I use a local LLM with it, but you can use a hosted LLM if you like.
The core home automation stuff can run on a potato. The LLM just writes new automations when I ask it, or acts as a natural language interface.
I use a pretty small 4B parameter local LLM, on a fairly modest mini PC. It doesn't take a frontier model to do that kind of work.
Digital sovereignty laws may mandate/remove access to LLMs of other countries on economic and national security grounds.