Some benefits: for the user - the data stays private as all processing is done on device.
You can get much faster inference times and create applications with real-time interactions. The applications can work offline once the models are downloaded. The browser comes with tons of sensors (microphone/camera/accelerometer/etc) and the data from these sensors can be fed into the models in real time without needing to do a round trip to a server.
Yes if the model is proprietary it maybe wouldn’t make sense to have the user download the weights as it could be reverse engineered, but for open source models
it’s not an issue. And anyways the value these days is in the dataset and training of the models.
Check out this great article on edge computing:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/edge-computing-could-push-...