Millions More Smartphones Will Become A.I.-Enabled This Year

The coming year could see the rise of consumer-focused machine learning, and the beginning of the end for corporate omniscience about user data. That's one of the implications of the latest batch of influential predictions from financial firm Deloitte, which projects that more than 300 million machine learning-tailored smartphones will be sold this year. Right now, the most important machine learning algorithms -- the ones that let us control our phones with a voice command and get predictive directions to our next destination -- use mostly out-board computing power to do their jobs. They run primarily on remote data servers operated by companies like Google, and while these companies incur huge costs for running all that computation, they make it up through the increased insight into users' lives. Sure, they have to pay for the power to parse a command to set a calendar event for 9 p.m. Eastern on Friday.