Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has issued a warning: the future of artificial intelligence (AI) may not be in the cloud, which means that massive, energy-hungry data centres for which tech giants pouring billions of dollars may become irrelevant. He said that the AI power will be in users’ pockets with silicon that powers their devices, capable of running sophisticated LLMs.In an interview, Srinivas argued that the rise of high-performance, on-device AI is the biggest existential threat to the centralised infrastructure which is currently dominating the tech industry.“Well, the the biggest threat to a data centre is if the intelligence can be packed locally on a chip that’s running on the device and then there’s no need to inference all of it on like one centralized data center. It becomes more decentralized and even better if the models that are coming along with the chip are are things that adapt to you,” Srinivas said.“And by the way, you don’t even you may not even need that for adaptation to you. It could just be um data that lives on your computer or your device um that can be retrieved on the fly,” he added.
Perplextiy CEO explaines benefits of moving AI from cloud to machines
Srinivas postulated multiple benefits of moving AI from the cloud to the device. He said that the processing will happen instantly on the device, removing the delay of sending data to a remote server. Having AI on machine will ensure that personal data never leaves the user’s hardware. Thirdly, Srinivas compared local AI to having a “digital brain” that lives with the user, learning and evolving based on their specific habits.“That way you don’t have to repeat it. That’s your intelligence. You own it. It’s your brain. Then that really disrupts the whole data centre industry like it doesn’t make sense to spend all this money 500 billion 5 trillion whatever on building all the centralised data centres across the world that do a lot of the intelligence workloads for people. This is the question. This is whatever it’s a $10 trillion question, hundred trillion dollar question,” he explained.“That’s not yet happened. No one’s actually shipped a model that can be packaged on your computer, a very efficient chip locally and then it’s very intelligent enough that it can complete tasks reliably. That’s not yet happened. When that happens, I think it’s it’ll be very interesting,” the Perplexity CEO concluded.
