[HN Gopher] Why TinyML is still so hard to get excited about
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Why TinyML is still so hard to get excited about
        
       Author : mariuz
       Score  : 109 points
       Date   : 2023-04-04 13:34 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (staceyoniot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (staceyoniot.com)
        
       | m3kw9 wrote:
       | Prob now you got GPT and there is a new baseline they have to
       | live up to
        
       | Buttons840 wrote:
       | I've been learning how transformers work, and also reading about
       | RNNs.
       | 
       | It seems that transformers have succeeded because they can be
       | parallelized, and solve many of the problems that RNNs have. This
       | has lead to the advancements we've seen recently with GTP. Big
       | companies are able to throw their data centers at the problem and
       | train impressive and massive models.
       | 
       | Part of me hopes that a non-parallelizable AI architecture might
       | be discovered which performs even better. Perhaps the problems
       | with RNNs could be solved in a way that doesn't parallelize? We
       | would be so fortunate if a desktop computer could run an AI
       | that's half as good as Microsoft's or Amazon's best AI. I would
       | love to see the advantage of the data center removed.
       | 
       | Philosophically, this does make some sense. The wisdom behind
       | sayings such as "adding more people makes the project even later"
       | exist because the greatest intellects we're aware of (ourselves)
       | do not parallelize well.
        
       | brrrrrm wrote:
       | ML is still in a compute hungry growth phase. Every exciting new
       | achievement in accuracy requires more compute than before. It
       | makes sense that tinyML, which has less compute, would always
       | have lagging modeling support and be a bit less interesting.
       | 
       | TinyML does result in much cheaper products, though.
        
       | bambax wrote:
       | I'm sure there are lots of fun things to do with an Arduino that
       | could recognize gestures; I'm very surprised nobody's "excited"
       | by this?
       | 
       | For example, I made a photobooth simple device based on a Pi and
       | a regular DSLR; the person takes a photo by pressing a button,
       | then the Pi checks the camera and sends the latest image in a web
       | gallery somewhere. The problem is the button: it needs a remote.
       | If wired, it risks destroying the whole apparatus if someone
       | pulls on the cord; if wireless, it risks being lost.
       | 
       | A gesture-based trigger would be super cool; but having it run on
       | the Pi through the DSLR risks damaging the camera, so it should
       | run on a different device, cheap and not too power hungry, such
       | as an Arduino.
       | 
       | What about some kind of MIDI-controller based on an Arduino that
       | could recognize gestures?
       | 
       | I also made a webapp to learn sight-reading (babeloop.com) but it
       | requires users clicking or tapping on the screen, which is not
       | natural.
       | 
       | It would be cool to be able to listen to users reading notes out
       | loud and detect if they're right or wrong, on the fly, locally in
       | a browser or on a phone. A light general speech recognition model
       | such as VOSK is 40Mb and is able to recognize most phonemes; but
       | for music sight reading, there are only 7 syllabes, so one should
       | be able to make a much smaller model? I don't know how hard it
       | would be though to train my own model...?
        
         | JohnFen wrote:
         | > I'm sure there are lots of fun things to do with an Arduino
         | that could recognize gestures
         | 
         | Arduinos can recognize gestures, faces, etc. right now with
         | well-established tech, no servers needed. I've had a couple of
         | robots running around my place that do this sort of thing for a
         | number of years now.
        
         | tiedieconderoga wrote:
         | Embedded platforms generally have very little memory and very
         | few hardware threads.
         | 
         | Tiny SoCs will likely need accelerators to run more interesting
         | models. For example, ARM is working on a ML coprocessor to pair
         | with their Cortex-M chips.
         | 
         | https://www.arm.com/products/silicon-ip-cpu/ethos/ethos-u55
        
       | bob1029 wrote:
       | After the initial obsession with Jupiter-scale models, we quickly
       | discovered that very small models can perform _even better_ if
       | you reorganize your problem.
       | 
       | Last week, we were trying to fine tune a 175b parameter model to
       | take a natural language prompt with hopes of directly-outputting
       | correct, domain-specific SQL. Now that reality has passed, we are
       | looking at different paths.
       | 
       | As of this week, we are trying to hit everything with the binary
       | classification hammer. Turns out you can train a model to output
       | 1 of 2 possible tokens with exponentially fewer parameters,
       | training items, machine hours, etc. The statistics available in
       | binary classification are also incredibly powerful and the
       | results are trivial to reason with.
       | 
       | Even if you need _thousands_ of binary classifiers, their scale
       | and granularity makes this a non-event or potentially an
       | advantage.
       | 
       | The real integration magic with AI/ML is starting to look like a
       | weird form of set theory. At this level of complexity, detecting
       | (and potentially confirming) the user's intention is way more
       | important than trying to draw a direct map from input to
       | destination.
        
       | cxie wrote:
       | TinyML would depend on the breakthrough in Edge/embed AI chips,
       | which doesn't seem to come in the near future...
        
         | jononor wrote:
         | Why do you say that? There are microcontrollers announced with
         | neural network accelerators integrated, and low power FPGAs
         | with accelerators on the market, along with many chip startups
         | aiming to provide milliwatt scale dedicated neural chips.
        
       | svantana wrote:
       | I'm very into TinyML - not because of IoT but because small and
       | fast models work well in (clientside) webpages, in realtime
       | systems and pretty much everywhere. All while consuming less
       | resources, which should be celebrated. Also, it's more democratic
       | - anyone can compete in this field, supercomputer not needed.
       | 
       | IMO, what is needed is a larger focus on resource consumption in
       | competitions, benchmarks and rankings. For example, I like that
       | you can rank some lists on paperswithcode by number of parameters
       | [1].
       | 
       | [1] https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-
       | imag...
        
       | reisender wrote:
       | It seems like many of the TinyML use cases are hidden or somewhat
       | dull, making it difficult to get people excited about it. Do you
       | think there are ways to make TinyML more exciting and appealing
       | to a wider audience? How can we better showcase the potential of
       | TinyML and its ability to bring more privacy to IoT and give
       | everyday products superpowers?
        
         | hosh wrote:
         | How about just being able to run a home assistant with AI
         | support to reprogram the home assistant, without having to
         | spend a lot more electricity? They don't have to have
         | superpowers to be useful.
        
           | marcosdumay wrote:
           | I expect tinyML to be way too tiny for that.
           | 
           | The clear use-case for it is mechanical control and feedback.
           | But it seems that every robot has enough tiny problems that
           | you can justify a larger CPU anyway. I too am having a hard
           | time being excited about it.
        
           | STM32F030R8 wrote:
           | My home assistant runs on 5-10W power. Nothing it does
           | requires a lot more electricity than a light bulb.
        
             | hosh wrote:
             | Does that home assistant have a self-hosted LLM interface
             | that helps you with configuration and setup?
        
       | hosh wrote:
       | That's weird. Being able to use AI without being beholden to Big
       | Tech seems like a huge win to me. Especially when I want to
       | ensure that the AI is making best effort for my local community's
       | best interest, and not the best interest of a large corp.
        
         | mirker wrote:
         | Even so, you can run models on a private cloud. No need to do
         | anything but sense on an embedded device.
        
           | alex_sf wrote:
           | 'private' cloud.
        
             | mirker wrote:
             | 1 GPU in a NAS server is all you need. Pretty simple.
        
               | alex_sf wrote:
               | I agree, but that's colo/on-prem. Not a private cloud,
               | which is typically just some allocation of dedicated
               | resources from a public cloud.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | Huh. I always thought of "private cloud" as meaning "my
               | own server", not a carveout on a public cloud. I learned
               | something new today.
               | 
               | How does such a "private cloud" differ from using the
               | "public cloud"? The two seem identical to me.
        
           | JohnFen wrote:
           | A device that doesn't need a network connection to work beats
           | a device that does every time.
        
           | hosh wrote:
           | That's a huge burden on the natural resources (electricity).
           | 
           | Beyond local control, I gave other examples of embedded AI in
           | other comments -- or more specifically, what you can do with
           | an embedded LLM. Namely, being able to have a better human
           | interface for complex settings, and being able to reprogram
           | protocols (or anything that is "software-defined") for
           | future-proofing.
        
             | mirker wrote:
             | Integrating an accelerator into a dishwasher is also
             | expensive. How many inferences are you going to get out of
             | it before the hardware is outdated? Once a day for 5 years
             | may not be enough to justify the cost. Compare that to
             | having a single GPU in a server in your house that services
             | all your IoT devices, which can be readily upgraded and
             | requires no special software. The is no benefit to doing
             | inference on device unless you are in the business of
             | selling said devices.
        
               | hosh wrote:
               | A big part of TinyML is finding alternate paths for
               | implementing AI in resource-constrained space.
               | 
               | We already have SoC that is functionally not so much
               | different from modern microcontrollers. Depending on
               | economics of scale, it isn't that big of a leap of
               | imagination to see a microcontroller which includes 4-bit
               | vector ops like a GPU.
        
             | STM32F030R8 wrote:
             | >huge burden on natural resources
             | 
             | Can you explain? I don't see how sending data to the cloud
             | is a huge burden compared to say an EV or your AC unit.
        
               | hosh wrote:
               | If by "private cloud", we mean carving out something from
               | a public cloud, I'm still not sure I'd want something as
               | important and private as AI to be in a cloud facility.
               | 
               | Even if you put together a private cloud in a data
               | center, it's still going to use up a lot more electrical
               | resources compared to say, an iphone-sized usage, much
               | less in a low-powered, embedded application.
               | 
               | Also, there's a tendency for our civilization, when we
               | make efficiency gains with breakthrough technologies, to
               | then expand our usage. We don't do a great job of
               | actually reducing overall energy expenditure.
        
         | hgsgm wrote:
         | The article is about a consumer's perspective on uninspiring
         | proprietary products being offered by Big Tech.
         | 
         | If you build the thing you are talking about, you will create
         | the excitement currently missing.
        
           | hosh wrote:
           | Sure, because Big Tech is trying to retain control of the
           | market via subscriptions and rent-seeking.
        
       | vlovich123 wrote:
       | > So instead, Warden's company is releasing a new sensor that can
       | scan a QR code. The idea behind this $6 sensor is that appliance
       | makers can put it inside their products as a method of getting
       | devices onto Wi-Fi easier. A user could simply show their Wi-Fi
       | QR code (I find mine in my router app) to the sensor and get
       | their, say, fridge or washer online. I think it could be neat as
       | a way to transfer a recipe to an oven, or specific washing
       | instructions to a washing machine for particular items of
       | clothing. Unfortunately, unlike scanning a new shirt and getting
       | the machine to change its parameters to provide the best wash,
       | many of the use cases for TinyML are going to be kind of boring.
       | 
       | Sorry. What's the ML piece here? QR codes are from the 90s and
       | don't use any ML I'm aware of...
       | 
       | > However, at the conference Warden told me that, while he'd
       | quickly discovered that the model worked, educating people about
       | new gestures was tough. "No one knows that these gestures are
       | available," he said. This makes sense. If you remember back to
       | the launch of the first iPhone and its touchscreen, the first ads
       | and demonstrations focused on things like taps and pinch-to-zoom.
       | Those weren't intuitive; they were taught.
       | 
       | And if that were true, that's solvable just like with the iPhone
       | by having tutorials when you boot your TV. I think what's
       | actually the case that the CEO doesn't want to admit is that he's
       | having trouble convincing TV makers this is a useful model when
       | they're all going into voice-operated UIs. That and the BOM cost
       | makes it unappealing.
        
         | vlovich123 wrote:
         | > Elsewhere at the event, HP showed off two TinyML
         | implementations with ST Micro that are embedded in new laptops.
         | The first TinyML model uses a gyroscope to detect if a laptop
         | has been placed in a bag or taken out of a bag. The idea behind
         | the implementation is that the laptop will start booting up
         | when it's taken out of a bag in preparation for its owner to
         | use it. If the model detects the laptop has been placed in a
         | bag, it will change heating and cooling parameters to make sure
         | the laptop doesn't overheat.
         | 
         | And when the model gets it wrong (which it invariably does)
         | you've got a laptop that failed to be in sleep in a bag (maybe
         | you fallback to more primitive models that are foolproof like
         | increased temp + lid closed = in bag). But seriously. If you go
         | to sleep on lid close, putting it in a bag doesn't really
         | change your thermal envelope (should have happened on lid
         | closed). And booting before your lid opens seems silly when
         | Apple shows that it can be done near instantaneously. In other
         | words, this seems like a PM developed feature for promo instead
         | of good engineering being done.
         | 
         | > The second use case also helps with thermal management. In
         | that use case, the laptop detects when it is on a hard or soft
         | surface. If it's on a soft surface, like a bed or a person's
         | lap, it will try to run cooler so as to avoid overheating.
         | 
         | Ok. Maybe this is interesting. But do you actually need ML or
         | is it enough to define a thermal budget and recognize a solid
         | surface can probably dissipate heat more quickly and anything
         | beyond that doesn't buy you all that much.
        
           | digging wrote:
           | All of these use cases seem like AI will only do a worse job
           | of solving the problem.
        
             | nelgaard wrote:
             | Yes, with these kind of issues you need to keep it very
             | simple.
             | 
             | I have an old Chromebook that runs Linux. I did have the
             | problem that it would sometimes wake up in my backpack and
             | run very hot. Eventually I found out that the plastic lid
             | was soft enough that it would bend and let the screen touch
             | the touchpad which would wake up the Chromebook. It was
             | possible to disable this behavior but it was not simple
             | enought.
        
             | Xelynega wrote:
             | This is giving blockchain/cryptocurrency ptsd. "We are
             | early, it's just not there yet"
        
               | marcosdumay wrote:
               | How dare you? AI pioneered that kind of empty promises
               | _decades_ before blockchain was even a thing!
               | 
               | But, seriously, this is just a "look at me!" scream to
               | get customers or investors. People do that with every
               | single thing (doesn't even need to be an actual thing),
               | and it's no fault of the thing at all. It's not a matter
               | of being there yet or anything, it's just dishonest
               | people.
        
         | Joker_vD wrote:
         | > I think it could be neat as a way to transfer a recipe to an
         | oven, or specific washing instructions to a washing machine for
         | particular items of clothing.
         | 
         | ...is there also a neat way to _remotely_ transfer the recipe
         | 's ingredients to an oven or load clothes into a washing
         | machine?
         | 
         | One of my buddies once joked about the smart homes that they
         | allow you to unlock your front door while being anywhere in the
         | world -- but sadly, there is almost never a useful reason to
         | unlock your house's front door from 2000 km away.
        
           | rcme wrote:
           | If you ever have serious work done on your house, it requires
           | letting contracts in for weeks. If you're not home, you need
           | to leave them a key outside where dozens of people likely
           | have access to it. I always change my locks afterwards, but a
           | digital solution would be pretty nice.
        
             | JohnFen wrote:
             | I don't know. I think a lockbox would be a cheaper and
             | easier solution for that use case.
        
               | rcme wrote:
               | How would that solve the problem? Any of the workers
               | could take a picture of your key and recreate it later.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | Perhaps I misunderstood the problem you were talking
               | about. I thought it was leaving a key unprotected. A
               | lockbox resolves that, by restricting access to the key
               | to people who know the lockbox combination.
               | 
               | You mentioned rekeying the lock after the work, so I
               | assumed that key copying wasn't the issue as you found a
               | solution for that.
        
           | throwaway1777 wrote:
           | Airbnb is about the only one.
        
             | zmix wrote:
             | Or your children lost/forgot the key and nobody is at home.
        
             | cossatot wrote:
             | Or letting someone in to feed your cat.
        
               | throwaway1777 wrote:
               | Housesitting is a good one
        
           | vlovich123 wrote:
           | What about when you're at work and want to let the repair
           | person in? Or you run an Airbnb and want to let in your
           | guests without having to worry about keys and lockboxes. Or
           | you want to let in a family member. I think there are valid
           | reasons for that.
        
             | JohnFen wrote:
             | I'm guessing that the existence of edge cases like that are
             | why Joker_vD included the "almost" qualifier.
        
             | ipaddr wrote:
             | You would let a repairman in without someone present?
        
               | bckr wrote:
               | Well you forgot about my micro drone that follows them
               | around filming their every move.
               | 
               | ... except unironically
        
               | vlovich123 wrote:
               | Sure. In such a scenario I could have cameras in place if
               | I'm super paranoid. In my experience repair people have
               | been extremely professional and have a reputation to
               | uphold, so if I can't be at home and a repair needs to
               | happen, I don't see a problem if that convenience is
               | important to me.
        
             | justrealist wrote:
             | Yeah, this reminds me of the other article on the
             | frontpage, about Google not understanding why anyone needs
             | 5m files in Drive. Well, maybe _you_ don 't.
             | 
             | Maybe it's not something that affects you, or 80% of
             | people, 80% of the time... that doesn't make it useless.
             | Try to step outside your own life even a few steps...
        
           | burlesona wrote:
           | True, but it's pretty awesome being able to check if you
           | forgot to lock the back door, and then lock it, as your
           | flight is landing 2000km away.
        
         | Dalewyn wrote:
         | >Sorry. What's the ML piece here? QR codes are from the 90s and
         | don't use any ML I'm aware of...
         | 
         | You must have missed the memo, _everything_ is AI now.
         | 
         | Your toaster? It toasts your bread with AI.
         | 
         | Your microwave? It heats your food with AI.
         | 
         | (Yes this is sarcasm. "AI" has become a meaningless buzzword
         | thanks to marketing and the media. Same goes for "machine
         | learning".)
        
         | neodypsis wrote:
         | > Sorry. What's the ML piece here? QR codes are from the 90s
         | and don't use any ML I'm aware of...
         | 
         | Presumably they are using object detection to recognize where
         | the QR codes are located in the image? Which they then feed to
         | the standard QR decoding algorithms.
        
           | vlovich123 wrote:
           | Yeah I note that down below in my response:
           | 
           | > That being said, it's possible the ML piece is about
           | reading multiple QR codes at once in different angles. I
           | could see that requiring some ML. But still. It feels like a
           | solution in search of a problem since they seem to be taking
           | the "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks"
           | approach to building products.
           | 
           | What I'm saying is that washing clothes doesn't seem to
           | benefit from any QR codes. And the cooking example is even
           | more confusing because presumably you'd have one for the
           | recipe, not per ingredient
        
             | neodypsis wrote:
             | I can see how it could be useful to have such an input
             | method in an embedded system for some configuration options
             | like WiFi credentials.
             | 
             | > What I'm saying is that washing clothes doesn't seem to
             | benefit from any QR codes. And the cooking example is even
             | more confusing because presumably you'd have one for the
             | recipe, not per ingredient
             | 
             | Well, we are in the age of IoT. Every appliance now wants
             | to be connected to the Internet.
        
         | sleepybrett wrote:
         | Given that this stuff was built into the original and revised
         | kinect software on the xbox (360 and one) and no-one really
         | knew or cared. I believe that the initial setup stuff on the
         | xbox one covered the voice commands / gesture commands. I have
         | a feeling they were soon forgotten. Unfortunate given how
         | powerful the kinect, especially version 2, is. When it comes
         | down to it, gesture control is often fiddly and obscure (there
         | is no button on the screen to push to remind you the function
         | exists, you just have to know 'if i wave at it, it will
         | probably turn on'). Both of those downsides turn it into a non
         | starter for most users.
        
         | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
         | Probably you're washing more than one shirt at a time, so the
         | optimal washing parameters for the whole load is going to be
         | some not-quite-average of the the data on all of the input QR
         | codes, combined with whatever the machine sensors learn. Seems
         | pretty ML to me, though the writing could use work.
        
           | vlovich123 wrote:
           | At which point the user can pick the optimal parameters
           | anyway (and likely do a reasonable enough job) without fancy
           | ML. Fancy ML would be things like "take out items xyz" to
           | wash just whites.
           | 
           | That being said, it's possible the ML piece is about reading
           | multiple QR codes at once in different angles. I could see
           | that requiring some ML. But still. It feels like a solution
           | in search of a problem since they seem to be taking the
           | "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" approach to
           | building products.
        
             | nelgaard wrote:
             | Yeah, about 15 years ago when there were companies planning
             | to replace barcodes with RFID tags on all products, a big
             | selling point was that washing machines could detect red
             | socks in a white wash.
             | 
             | Someone did make such a washing machine, from 2012:
             | https://www.appliancesonline.com.au/academy/appliance-
             | news/s...
             | 
             | Note the caption: "The washing machine's brains do the
             | thinking for us".
        
             | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
             | I can't be bothered to go through the tags and think about
             | settings. If the laundry destroys it I'll just stop buying
             | things like that going forward. Probably there are people
             | as lazy as me, but with a better eye for fashion. Maybe
             | they would care?
        
           | JohnFen wrote:
           | Is this an actual problem that needs solving?
        
             | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
             | I wouldn't know, I wear the same thing every day, it all
             | goes in the same load at the end of each month(ish).
             | 
             | But I could be convinced that our clothes would wear more
             | slowly if the machines had more data about what they were
             | washing.
        
               | JohnFen wrote:
               | I don't think that's likely to be true. However, there is
               | an easy way to reduce the damage to your clothing that
               | washing causes:
               | 
               | 1) Wash in cold water 2) Use less detergent 3) Set your
               | dryer on the "low heat" setting.
        
         | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
         | > get their, say, fridge or washer online
         | 
         | Yeah, no thanks.
        
       | justaregulardev wrote:
       | The ability to have models that can run on resource-constrained
       | devices does feel like a strong direction for ML to go in and
       | could lead to greater user privacy. However, I'm unconvinced by
       | the IoT-aspect of this tech. In many ways, it feels like IoT has
       | "failed" to be as popular with consumers as expected and feels
       | overhyped. Will adding ML to IoT devices really make a
       | difference?
        
         | hosh wrote:
         | Adding an embedded LLM as a human interface for every appliance
         | is a huge win-- for consumers at least.
         | 
         | For example, I have a dishwasher with a bunch of settings, can
         | sense load, etc. It's got a touch interface that works with wet
         | hands. Or I can tell it to start with the usual settings, or
         | that a particular load is a bit different. Same with the
         | laundry, the pressure cooker.
         | 
         | It is less mind bandwidth when you got kids.
         | 
         | What I don't want, is for my appliances to do is to phone home
         | to the makers.
         | 
         | LLMs (if you don't somehow trigger its insanity) can be far
         | more capable than Siri. How do you get that into something more
         | energy efficient than a high end gaming rig?
         | 
         | Something more hidden is using LLMs to reprogram machine-to-
         | machine protocols. That might extend the lifetime of machines
         | that have to talk with other machines, but it breaks planned
         | obsolescence.
         | 
         | There are plenty of exciting product ideas. Whether they are
         | exciting revenue generators are another thing entirely.
        
           | calibas wrote:
           | Adding hardware capable of running an LLM would significantly
           | increase the price of appliances, not sure that's a win for
           | consumers.
           | 
           | In the context of the article, an LLM is kind of the opposite
           | of "TinyML" and not something most IoT devices could even
           | handle.
        
             | hosh wrote:
             | Not if you can condense the LLM into being able to run on
             | the embedded hardware.
             | 
             | Article aside, reducing energy use for models is one of the
             | research areas for TinyML.
        
               | calibas wrote:
               | I'm skeptical that an LLM with billions of parameters can
               | be compressed down into something that runs on embedded
               | hardware and still remain useful.
        
               | bckr wrote:
               | Skeptical you should be, but I'm optimistic. We have
               | papers showing that knowledge in these models can be
               | edited and deleted. Sam Altman makes the point that too
               | much compute is being spent on using the LLM as a
               | database.
               | 
               | Thinking about how few things any of these CUIs need to
               | know about, I'm optimistic that we can distill them down
               | to a workable size while maintaining the LLM magic.
               | 
               | "Fridge, what is the meaning of life?"
               | 
               | 'Sorry, I don't know about that. Ask me something about
               | what's in your fridge.'
               | 
               | "Okay how many eggs do I have."
               | 
               | "I see 3 eggs."
               | 
               | When I can have that conversation by proxy through my
               | phone's onboard CUI while at the store, I'm going to get
               | a lot of value out of that.
        
           | JohnFen wrote:
           | > It is less mind bandwidth when you got kids.
           | 
           | If it works like ChatGPT does, then I would find it a greater
           | mental burden. You'd have to carefully craft what you're
           | telling it, or engage in a conversation of some sort, instead
           | of just hitting a couple of buttons or turning a dial.
        
           | marcosdumay wrote:
           | > Adding an embedded LLM as a human interface for every
           | appliance is a huge win-- for consumers at least.
           | 
           | So, appliances get even harder to understand settings, that
           | are actually illogical, instead of just having hidden logic?
           | That's not a clear win.
        
             | bckr wrote:
             | No, there's an underlying logic and underlying settings
             | that are still accessible.
             | 
             | But transparently wrapped around that there's a "good
             | Clippy" who can teach, interpret, and orchestrate those
             | settings with a CUI (conversational UI, pronounced "koo-
             | ee").
        
               | marcosdumay wrote:
               | Oh, a settings assistant is much easier to get right.
               | 
               | It is just completely against the modernly accepted "best
               | practices" for devices and interface development. So I
               | don't see how we can get it. But yeah, it could be good.
        
               | [deleted]
        
         | eschneider wrote:
         | ML has been on IoT devices for years. Heck, there are embedded
         | arm SOCs with built in CNN coprocessors that will run your
         | tensorflow models as-is. Again, they've been shipping in volume
         | IoT products for years.
         | 
         | If ML is a win for an IoT device, the hardware's been there for
         | a while, though I'm sure yet-cheaper hardware might unlock a
         | few more applications, it doesn't feel like much of a game
         | changer.
        
         | lamuswawir wrote:
         | IoT sensors powered by ML may not provide good use cases for
         | consumers, mostly because all things they can do can be done by
         | a large model in the cloud, plus a phone. It will get
         | interesting when we ask what use cases can't be solved by
         | phone+cloud combo.
         | 
         | Such things as air quality management are good use cases. You
         | can't use your phone to do that.
        
           | digging wrote:
           | > Such things as air quality management are good use cases.
           | You can't use your phone to do that.
           | 
           | Why not? I am strictly against IoT in my household so I may
           | be way off base, but why can't your phone control your air
           | purifier?
        
         | mirker wrote:
         | Privacy doesn't matter unless the IoT devices are secure. Often
         | times, they're not.
        
       | RugnirViking wrote:
       | From my work in AI & robotics, its generally finnicky and a bit
       | crap even when a ton of work goes into it with a lot more compute
       | (jetson nano or higher). I feel like trying to optimise those
       | kinds of models is a bit niche/premature
        
         | steve_adams_86 wrote:
         | As a hobbyist that has been my perception of the situation as
         | well, though I wasn't sure if I was just missing something.
         | 
         | The potential is immense and exciting, but try as I might, I
         | can't seem to make even fairly simple things work reliably as I
         | want them to.
         | 
         | One thing I love about embedded projects is that you can
         | achieve pretty incredible reliability because everything can be
         | so dialed in and isolated from points of failure in, say, an
         | operating system. Trying to use ML for simple tasks felt like
         | it eliminated that and introduced seemingly arbitrary failure
         | into projects I really needed to work perfectly.
         | 
         | Again, just a hobbyist, so I can't make any broad statements.
         | It seems to align with what you're saying though. Once we get
         | past this hump and have more powerful/effective models at a
         | reasonable price point, I feel like it could be transformative.
         | At the moment it's still extremely interesting and fun to
         | experiment with.
        
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