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Comment by WalterSear

4 days ago

It's still a SAAS, with components that couldn't be replicated client-side, such as AI.

Google's own Gemma models are runnable locally on a Pixel 9 Max so some lev of AI is replicatable client side. As far as Gmail running locally, it wouldn't be impossible for Gmail to be locally hosted and hit a local cache which syncs with a server only periodically over IMAP/JMAP/whatever if Google actually wanted to do it.

  • Yes, but seems like a lot of hassle for not much gain (for Google).

    • The gain, as far as local AI goes for Google, is that, at Google scale, the CPU/GPU time to run even a small model like Gemma will add up across Gmail's millions of users. If clients have the hardware for it (which Pixel 9's have) it means Gmail's servers aren't burning CPU/GPU time on it.

      As far as how Gmail's existing offline mode works, I don't know.

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Right. But does it matter whether computation happens on the client or server? Probabaly on both in the end.

But yes I am looking forward to having my own LMS on my PC which only I have access to.