Yes, latency is huge. Modern digital audio stacks in consumer OSes are still completely terrible at this. Not that it's an easy problem to solve.
But it's pretty hard to beat elections flowing through an analog circuit, when in the digital side you have to: convert analog to digital, run through the kernel to get to user space, run the bits through the RNN, send back to kernel space, convert to analog and finally send to an output.
In order to be competitive with a 1980s guitar pedal, you have to do all of that in under ~10ms latency, and that's just really hard still.
Even though we carry around these super computers in our pockets these days, there are still some things left where analog still beats the pants.
But it's pretty hard to beat elections flowing through an analog circuit, when in the digital side you have to: convert analog to digital, run through the kernel to get to user space, run the bits through the RNN, send back to kernel space, convert to analog and finally send to an output.
In order to be competitive with a 1980s guitar pedal, you have to do all of that in under ~10ms latency, and that's just really hard still.
Even though we carry around these super computers in our pockets these days, there are still some things left where analog still beats the pants.