2025 will be the year of on-device AI
2025 will be the year of on-device AI. Massive investment in foundation models has enabled ever-improving small on-device models to be distilled, too. I'm super excited about the Cambrian explosion of AI into embedded electronics that's going to follow.
It's hard not to draw parallels to how the smartphone wars drove economies of scale that inadvertently gave birth to an explosion in new embedded applications, from drones to wearables, and an improvement in UI across all verticals.
Things are evolving fast, and LLMs can be too inefficient and hallucination-prone for some embedded applications today. CNNs and classical ML will still have their place. Embedded applications remain individual and unique; there's no one-size-fits-all.
But even as just part of the development flow or data generation process, generative AI is an accelerant to ideation, validation, and execution of product ideas.