No cloud required: Why AI's future is at the edge - SiliconANGLE

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.