Does personal AI require Big Compute?

I don’t think it does. Not for everything.

We already have personal AI for autocomplete. Do we need Big Compute for a personal AI to tell us which pieces within our Amazon orders are in which line items in our Visa statements? (Different items in a shipment often appear inside different charges on a card.) Do we need Big Compute to tell us who we had lunch with, and where, three Fridays ago? Or to give us an itemized list of all the conferences we attended in the last five years? Or what tunes or podcasts we’ve played (or heard) in the last two months (for purposes such as this one)?

Let’s say we want a list of all the books on our shelves using something like OpenCV to detect text in natural scene images using the EAST text detector? Or to use the same kind of advanced pattern recognition to catalog everything we can point a phone camera at in our homes? Even if we need to hire models from elsewhere to help us out, onboard compute should be able to do a lot of it, and to keep our personal data private.

Right now your new TV is reporting what you watch back to parties unknown. Your new car is doing the same. Hell, so is your phone. What if you had all that data? Won’t you be able to do more with it than the spies and their corporate customers can?

It might be handy to know all the movies you’ve seen and series you’ve binged on your TV and other devices—including, say, the ones you’ve watched on a plane. And to remember when it was you drove to that specialty store in some other city, what the name of it was, and what was the good place you stopped for lunch on the way.

This data should be yours first—and alone—and shared with others at your discretion. You should be able to do a lot more with information gathered about you than those other parties can—and personal AI should be able to help you do it without relying on Big Compute (beyond having its owners give you back whatever got collected about you).

At this early stage in the evolution of AI, our conceptual frame for AI is almost entirely a Big Compute one. We need much more thinking out loud about what personal AI can do. I’m sure the sum of it will end up being a lot larger than what we’re getting now from Big AI.