i agree.
i believe that for most people on the street, for most tasks, a Chat GPT 3.5 era LLM is sufficient enough. sprinkle in tool calling and other things, and that becomes enough. if you can prioritize that level of a model on-device (baking it in etc), then you can bifurcate AI users between those unwilling to pay and those who are willing to pay A LOT for frontier model performance.
Anyone even a little bit serious will be paying either way. If not for the cloud models, then for hardware upgrades.
Gemma 4 is already closer to gpt-4o level of intelligence, however it's knowledge is much lower.