We've already seen this progression - they debuted Magic Eraser as a cloud feature, then with the Pixel 8 they got it running locally on the device. But they also introduced Magic Editor with the Pixel 8, running on the cloud, and the Pixel 9 or 10 will probably run it on-device.

it may turn out more like the imagen timeline

2022-05 - google imagen research paper posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31484562

2022-12 - imagen developers leave google to form ideogram

2023-08 - ideogram ships a version of imagen, free, for anyone who wants to use it https://ideogram.ai/publicly-available

2023-12 - google "imagen 2" is officially "generally available for Vertex AI customers on the allowlist (i.e., approved for access)." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38628417