Edge AI is everywhere—and if you haven’t noticed it already, you certainly will very soon. The intersection of artificial intelligence and edge computing, edge AI prefers to perform computations on “edge” devices that are physically located close to the source of the data.
The answer to the question “Which technology firm has cutting-edge AI capabilities in 2021?” heavily depends on where you’re looking and what kind of features and use cases you’re considering. The good news is that artificial intelligence has never been so freely available to anyone who can afford it. Developments such as edge AI and pre-trained language models are democratizing the field of artificial intelligence, putting even state-of-the-art accomplishments within reach for the end user.
The traditional way of doing AI has been to offload the computation to remote servers in the cloud, rather than on the local device where the data was collected. This is for a very good reason: many AI tasks are extremely resource-intensive, requiring large amounts of processing power in order to finish in a reasonable time.
The question of the “best edge AI solutions” is, of course, a little subjective to begin with. What is the use case that you’re concerned with, and what are the metrics by which you’ll be judging the “best edge AI”?
Far from making edge AI less critical, 5G can actually complement edge AI, with both technologies working in concert to digitally transform your business.
Edge AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) are two cutting-edge technology trends that offer the potential to digitally transform your business:
This presentation by Michael Liou was part of the Open Systems Media AI Day, Deploying Vision Systems with AI Capabilities. Because of the proliferation of edge devices, computer vision is one of AI’s killer apps in the form of edge AI.
Edge AI is the intersection of edge computing and artificial intelligence: an AI paradigm that performs as much computation as possible on “edge” devices that are physically located close to the source of the data. This is in contrast to traditional approaches that first upload the data to remote servers running in the cloud, where the computation is then performed.
What are the benefits of edge AI over “traditional” Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing methods? The advantages of edge AI include:
5G and edge computing are inextricably intertwined technologies: each one enables the other. Edge computing depends on fast speeds and low latency in order to transfer large quantities of data in near real time—exactly what 5G is good at providing. For its part, 5G needs applications such as edge computing in order to justify its rollout to wider coverage areas. 5G allows for more and more computing to be done at the edge where the users and devices are physically located, offering unprecedented connectivity and power. The rollout of new technology developments such as edge computing and the 5G wireless network standard has created waves of excitement and speculation across the entire industry.
Chooch AI, a leading computer vision AI platform, is named as an Edge AI Tech Innovator for 2020. The report is titled “Emerging Technologies: Tech Innovators in Edge AI” (October 2020) and is available directly from Gartner. The report identifies twelve emerging Edge AI providers.