AI gadgets – on the device and on the network

Author: Raj Chandrashekhar

Continuing our series of articles on Artificial Intelligence, and Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) in particular, we thought we’d take a look at some of the recent statements from tech giants about how this innovation could change our lives. More importantly, should knowing what’s going on under the hood matter to gadget and app users?

Technology has been around for years and has been changing our lives – from the internal combustion engine-powered motor vehicle to the ubiquitous little pocket calculator. These and many other tech gadgets continue to work quietly behind the scenes while we, the users, happily go about implementing them to simplify our lives.

Today, these same people use their smartphone to hail a taxi, digitally book a doctor’s appointment, and order a meal or groceries with just a few clicks. Honestly, how many times do we think about the technology that makes all this happen? More importantly, should we really care?

Do we need to look under the hood to check the technology?

If that’s the case, why do tech giants keep bumping into each other in an attempt to make us aware of their innovative audacity almost every day of the week? Fortunately, these guys and their PR teams don’t work on weekends, otherwise they would come up with new ways to tell us how great they are.

Take the example of Gen AI, a technology that generates text, images, videos, and other data using artificial intelligence models that learn the patterns and structures of training input, and then generate new data with similar characteristics. These base models are built using multiple data sets from an industry or company and then used to train larger models.

Now that you have read the paragraph above, stop and think for a moment. How would this definition help or hinder you in using ChatGPT or any other application built on top of it? Meme creators with whom they spend a day in the field half-baked AI Gen models, you may care because they are looking for bugs. As for the rest of us, we’re moving on to the next smart technology.

Noise and confusion around technology

Recently, companies operating in the B2C space, such as Microsoft and Google, have taken the trouble to stand in our collective faces and tell us how smart their technologies are and, therefore, how necessary they are. From basic apps that allow users to query ChatGPT over the phone, to AI-driven assistants for routine word processing work.

For two decades, we have been using gadgets and applications that, thanks to such innovations, support collaboration, creativity and easy operation. At this stage, these big tech giants have rarely done as direct a PR push as they did with Generation Artificial Intelligence and everything about how it can beat bread and butter as the greatest innovation the world has ever seen.

As smartphones have become our single device for passenger transport, grocery shopping, food delivery and all kinds of online shopping, did it bother us that Amazon was connected to multiple networks of computers or that Ola taxi comes to you via a series of APIs that include maps , vehicle locations and the like?

How cutting-edge is the cutting-edge technology?

For a long time, the two words associated with every technology were “modern.” Today, they have been linked to Gen AI by the likes of Microsoft and Google, and even the usually dormant Apple now claims that an updated Siri will become magical once AI becomes part of it. By the way, they are announcing it on June 10th.

Microsoft recently told us that new desktops and laptops will now come with Windows operating system based on artificial intelligence. Sounds like a dream come true? Well, remove the chaff from the wheat and you have a feature that details everything you could ever do on your machine. There is another feature that allows you to restore old images. Wondering how many of us want to do any of these tasks? Or how many times a year will we do this? But there is such a buzz that Microsoft calls it the Copilot+ computer!!!

History on your device and on the web

At the heart of all this hype is the theory that AI features can be faster and more secure if they run on a handheld gadget, desktop device, or laptop. Does this mean they are moving away from the world of networked computing that has enabled much of the technology of the last decade?

Is on-device AI the next story waiting to unfold? Taking the example of secure facial or fingerprint identification, it could be argued that using AI on a device could be more secure than using the web. Because your data never leaves your device. However, we have to wait and see how the big tech giants could justify such a move and make it their USP.

Even more so when there is a clear polarization between those who believe in generational AI and those who are skeptical about its effectiveness. Of course, some have used this to telling effect, as in the case of a start-up founded by two Harvard graduates that captures the mood of a particular event and then delivers a collection of dresses and accessories to match it.

For now, we have to deal with the AI ​​mess of generation – on the device or on the network. At least until our Ola driver never cancels the trip again or our digital product order surprises us with delivering a brick instead of a smartphone.

Until then, switching from a regular smartphone to an AI-enabled smartphone may just prove that we, the buyers, are not as smart as the technology or the companies that sell it.