“Upset that your hair never looks right with a blurred background? On-device AI will fix that, rendering a much finer distinction between the subject and the blurred background,” Forrester said. “More importantly, the AI PC will also enable new use cases, such as eye contact correction, portrait blur, auto framing, lighting adjustment, and digital avatars.”
From the cloud to the edge
Experts see AI features and tools moving more to the edge — being embedded on smartphones, laptops and IoT devices — because AI computation is done near the user at the edge of the network, close to where the data is located, rather than centrally in a cloud computing facility or private data center. That means less lag time and better security.
Lenovo, for example, just released AI Now, an AI agent that leverages a local Large Language Model (LLM) built on Meta’s Llama 3, enabling a chatbot that’s able to run on PCs locally without an internet connection. And just last month, HP announced two AI PCs: theOmniBook Ultra Flip 2-in-1 laptop and the HP EliteBook X 14-inch Next-Gen AI laptop. The two PCs come with three engines (CPU, GPU, and NPU) to accelerate AI applications and include either an Intel Core Ultra processor with a dedicated AI engine or an AMD Ryzen PRO NPU processor enabling up to 55 TOPS (tera operations per second) performance.