Most recent news about AI seems to involve staggering amounts of money. OpenAI and Nvidia sign a $100b data center contract. Meta offers researchers $100m salaries. VCs invested almost $200b in AI …
The network aspect makes smart appliances smart. For example I can program the washing machine to be ready with the laundry when I get home… I don’t think it’s super useful to give it a microphone, computer and several gigabytes of RAM, just so I can go down to the basement and talk to the darn thing… It already has a bunch of LEDs to tell me the status and I think I’m perfectly fine with that.
I think I’m more for edge-computing. Have one smart home hub with the hardware to do voice and AI compute (with a slightly larger AI model on it), and then have one protocol for the appliances to communicate within my own Wifi. Something like Home Assistant does, just more towards general edge-compute. I think that’s more useful than spend extra money on every item in the household just to replace the touchscreen with a speaker/mic, and fit the cheapest conversation agent which is in the budget for that specific device.
AI chips are welcome, though. And I’m sure we have some useful applications for them. 1 TOPS isn’t much compared to a computer or graphics card. But certainly not bad either. I think we have several single board computers with similar specs. Just not the Raspberry Pi, that comes without a NPU.
The network aspect makes smart appliances smart. For example I can program the washing machine to be ready with the laundry when I get home… I don’t think it’s super useful to give it a microphone, computer and several gigabytes of RAM, just so I can go down to the basement and talk to the darn thing… It already has a bunch of LEDs to tell me the status and I think I’m perfectly fine with that.
I think I’m more for edge-computing. Have one smart home hub with the hardware to do voice and AI compute (with a slightly larger AI model on it), and then have one protocol for the appliances to communicate within my own Wifi. Something like Home Assistant does, just more towards general edge-compute. I think that’s more useful than spend extra money on every item in the household just to replace the touchscreen with a speaker/mic, and fit the cheapest conversation agent which is in the budget for that specific device.
AI chips are welcome, though. And I’m sure we have some useful applications for them. 1 TOPS isn’t much compared to a computer or graphics card. But certainly not bad either. I think we have several single board computers with similar specs. Just not the Raspberry Pi, that comes without a NPU.