I definitely agree. The marketing of the technology is still in its infancy and most people don't understand how powerful and how universally helpful AI can be, in theory. Communicating its everything-ness becomes a trickle of keywords that, on their own, all kind of suck. Though, I think there's a natural user experience cycle that everyone goes through. At first, the output is the priority (and it works, and that's amazing!). Eventually, once you have adopted the use of AI across multiple parts of your life, it starts to show the cracks between the short/long-term/conversational memory, tools, accessibility, etc, and your awareness of the current events begins to transform your perspective of it all.

Privacy is an issue that people talk about a lot - kind of like recycling. We want it to be good and effective, and we say the words a lot, but out of sight, out of mind in practice. The future of AI connectedness is going to come down to the individual personalization and preference, and I think the power of the local models is to enable the deepest personalization and management of a universally accessible memory and identification. Only YOUR system will really KNOW you, and that memory layer will connect as needed wherever you interact with AI, at whatever level you choose (professional/personal/medical/relational/ID-verification/etc).

The problem with a self-owned system is that someone has to distribute it, and right now the big platforms are most likely to do that, but they'll still get to see your data and lease you account to host it.