Sounds like an opportunity for a good engineer to come in and write something with the same functionality that runs locally and efficiently. The claim that it's wasteful only holds water if the non-wasteful solution exists and can accomplish the same tasks.

I am willing to bet you could run a model capable of using this on a 12GB 3060 + some RAM. (Qwen 3.6 35B)

Even the data centre using this probably uses less net energy, and costs less, to build one of these dumb arrows than the aggregate sum of the energy used to keep you alive while you Googled for the answer. (Including heating/cooling the building, powering the equipment growing the food you eat, etc.)

I don't disagree. But the existing tech solution - scrubbing through YouTube tutorial videos until I cobble together the bits of knowledge I need - is also quite overengineered, isn't it?

Obviously I'd prefer to ask specific questions to my expert human friend sitting at the next desk over, but sadly they don't exist.

I just hope there is a future where this tech exists without such big downsides.

>Imagine if videogames needed an external datacenter to run the tutorial levels.

I don't see how this is anything like that. The point here is to make it easier to give the user indications which has been a staple since forever, hell this is so much of a problem that there are entire solutions engineered to letting one user take control of the computer of another user through the net.

Beyond that, I'm sorry but looking for help in the context of videogames is extremely prevalent. That external datacenter to run the tutorial levels is sometimes called "Youtube" and others "Wikia".