They are bleeding resources so bad they wouldn't wait to put those efficient models in play. Every better model requires more and more resources.

You are on the money about the models not being good enough, let alone a harness. This whole worry is a nothing burger. Nobody outside of these labs has terabytes of RAM to run a model anywhere near a level of concern, let alone somehow distribute it across IoT devices or something. Anyone who has run a model locally knows how woeful a small model's abilities are.

This is just more Rationalist cult hand wringing. They believe they are building a digital god, so of course they are dreaming all of this nonsense up.