Comment by ActorNightly
2 hours ago
Google is an advertising company first and foremost. At some point, these local models have to fit into that umbrella. I don't quite know how yet, but its going to happen.
That being said, the real value in paid plans is that you get ecosystem integration that can read your gmail, photos, docs, and so on.
Google is also a Cloud Provider. Cloud is now ~18% of Google. While it is an advertising juggernaut. Cloud is also rapidly growing, so the local models simply fit as AI research and dev and getting more people on Gemini models. They /are/ advertising, effectively :)
local models still need information retrieval.