Why Do I Think There Will be Hundreds of Billions of TinyML Devices Within a Few Years?

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to have the chance to present at the Linley Processor Conference. I gave a talk on "What TinyML Needs from Hardware", and afterwards one of the attendees emailed to ask where some of my numbers came from. In particular, he was intrigued by my note on slide 6 that "Expectations are for tens or hundreds of billions of devices over the next few years". I thought that was a great question, since those numbers definitely don't come from any analyst reports, and they imply at least a doubling of the whole embedded system market from its current level of 40 billion devices a year. Clearly that statement deserves at least a few citations, and I'm an engineer so I try to avoid throwing around predictions without a bit of evidence behind them.