Anand Parthasarathy

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capability built into the hardware and software of personal technology devices has turned out to be the biggest technology breakthrough of the early months of 2024.

For nearly two years, AI has touched lay users of computing devices, as well as professionals, in new and dramatic ways — more so after the worldwide availability of ChatGPT, developed by a virtually unknown company, OpenAI, in November 2022. This created a whole new technology called Generative AI, which ‘learned’ the patterns and structure of input training data and then generated new data — text, images, video — that had similar characteristics.

Suddenly, millions of ordinary users were able to delegate tiresome tasks like preparing a project report, a news story or even a chunk of school homework to freely available tools like ChatGPT or its variants like Bing AI or Copilot from Microsoft or Bard from Google.

All these were cloud-based apps: one had to download or use them only with a live internet connection. What if the AI capability was built into one’s device itself, with onboard neural processing units which could respond at lightning speed and in real time, avoiding the delays inherent in…read more on NOPR