In a fascinating article in MIT Technology Review, How the AI Cloud Could Produce the Richest Companies Ever, Peter Burrows argues that the next wave of AI will be a winner-take-all land grab. The company that creates what he calls the AI operating system in the cloud will win a huge prize, and the rest of the entrants will fall behind.
Burrows presents a clear argument that is supported by quotes from experts, although there is a lot to disagree with such as the idea that one player will create an AI cloud first and dominate the market.
But for this article I will refute his fundamental claim that AI in the cloud is the main event. The key quote is: “Ultimately, the cloud is how most companies are going to make use of AI—and how technology suppliers are going to make money off of it,” said Nick McQuire, an analyst with CCS Insight cited in Burrows’s article.
In a way, Burrows himself counters this point. The first example in the Burrows article is based on an ML model that is deployed to an IoT device.
I’ve been working on understanding the industrial IoT, big data analytics, and AI-related topics for a few years, and I think that it is just as likely that more money will be made by putting AI at the edge rather than in the cloud.
Here’s my case.
First of all, there are strong arguments that processing at the edge will represent larger or as large infrastructure spend as the cloud, as Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman points out his blog The Edge will Eat the Cloud:
“The agility of cloud computing is great – but it simply isn’t enough. Massive centralization, economies of scale, self-service and full automation get us most of the way there – but it doesn’t overcome physics – the weight of data, the speed of light. As people need to interact with their digitally-assisted realities in real-time, waiting on a data center miles (or many miles) away isn’t going to work,” writes Bittman. “Latency matters. I’m here, right now, and I’m gone in seconds. Put up the right appealing advertising before I look away, point out the store that I’ve been looking for as I drive, let me know that a colleague is heading my way, help my self-driving car avoid other cars through a busy intersection. And do it now.”
The post Why AI At The Edge Is The Next Goldmine appeared first on Statii News.
source http://news.statii.co.uk/why-ai-at-the-edge-is-the-next-goldmine/
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