alt Hacker NewsWhen output is good enough, other considerations become more important. Most people on this planet cannot afford even an AI subscription, and cost of tokens is prohibitive to many low margin businesses. Privacy and personalization matter too, data sovereignty is a hot topic. Besides, we already see how focus has shifted to orchestration, which can be done on CPU and is cheap - software optimizations may compensate hardware deficiencies, so it’s not going to be frozen. I think the market for local hardware inference is bigger than for clouds, and it’s going to repeat Android vs iOS story.
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This is the same justification that was used to ship the (now almost entirely defunct) NPUs on Apple and Android devices alike.
The A18 iPhone chip has 15b transistors for the GPU and CPU; the Taalas ASIC has 53b transistors dedicated to inference alone. If it's anything like NPUs, almost all vendors will bypass the baked-in silicon to use GPU acceleration past a certain point. It makes much more sense to ship a CUDA-style flexible GPGPU architecture.
Taalas is more expensive than NPUs not less. You have GPU/NPU at home; just use it.