We can expect the model landscape to consolidate some day. Progress will become slower, innovations will become smaller. Not tomorrow, not next year, but the time will come.
And then it'll increasingly make sense to build such a chip into laptops, smartphones, wearables. Not for high-end tasks, but to drive the everyday bread-and-butter tasks.
The author would be excited to learn that CouchDB solves this problem since 20 years.
The use case the article describes is exactly the idea behind CouchDB: a database that is at the same time the server, and that's made to be synced with the client.
You can even put your frontend code into it and it will happily serve it (aka CouchApp).
And then it'll increasingly make sense to build such a chip into laptops, smartphones, wearables. Not for high-end tasks, but to drive the everyday bread-and-butter tasks.