No cloud required: Why AI’s future is at the edge

An article written by Robert Hof for Silicon Angle – For all the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, there’s one big obstacle to its seemingly relentless march: The algorithms for running AI applications have been so big and complex that they’ve required processing on powerful machines in the cloud and data centers, making a wide swath of applications less useful on smartphones and other “edge” devices

Now, that concern is quickly melting away, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in recent months in software, hardware and energy technologies that are rapidly coming to market.

That’s likely to drive AI-driven products and services even further away from a dependence on powerful cloud-computing services and enable them to move into every part of our lives — even inside our bodies. In turn, that could finally usher in what the consulting firm Deloitte late last year called “pervasive intelligence,” shaking up industries in coming years as AI services become ubiquitous.

By 2022, 80% of smartphones shipped will have AI capabilities on the device itself, up from 10% in 2017, according to market researcher ?Gartner Inc. And by 2023, that will add up to some 1.2 billion shipments of devices with on-device AI computing capabilities, up from 79 million in 2017, according to ABI Research.

A lot of startups and their backers smell a big opportunity. According to Jeff Bier, founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance, which held a conference this past week in Silicon Valley, investors have plowed some $1.5 billion into new AI chip startups in the past three years — more than was invested in all chip startups in the previous three years. Market researcher Yole Développement forecasts that AI application processors will enjoy a 46% compound annual growth rate through 2023, when nearly all smartphones will have them, from fewer than 20% today… Full article