AI is taking the tech world by storm, and Intel is determined not to be left behind, with plans to include AI across all its products.

Intel has been working to regain its crown as the world’s leading chipmaker. With the rise of AI, the company clearly sees an opportunity to leverage the new technology. In the company’s recent earnings call, CEO Pat Gelsinger said Intel will “build AI into every product that we build.”

Gelsinger also emphasized his belief that AI must make the transition to client devices rather than the cloud if it is to see full-scale adoption (via The Verge).

Today, you’re starting to see that people are going to the cloud and goofing around with ChatGPT writing a research paper and, you know, that’s like super cool, right? And kids are of course simplifying their homework assignments that way, but you’re not going to do that for every client — because becoming AI enabled, it must be done on the client for that to occur, right? You can’t go to the cloud. You can’t round trip to the cloud.

All of the new effects: real-time language translation in your zoom calls, real-time transcription, automation inferencing, relevance portraying, generated content and gaming environments, real-time creator environments through Adobe and others that are doing those as part of the client, new productivity tools — being able to do local legal brief generations on a clients, one after the other, right? Across every aspect of consumer, developer and enterprise efficiency use cases, we see that there’s going to be a raft of AI enablement and those will be client-centered. Those will also be at the edge.

You can’t round trip to the cloud. You don’t have the latency, the bandwidth, or the cost structure to round trip, say, inferencing at a local convenience store to the cloud. It will all happen at the edge and at the client.

Gelsinger even made the case that AI will eventually be used in devices as small as a hearing aid:

AI is going to be in every hearing aid in the future, including mine. Whether it’s a client, whether it’s an edge platform for retail and manufacturing and industrial use cases, whether it’s an enterprise data center, they’re not going to stand up a dedicated 10-megawatt farm.”

Gelsinger and Intel clearly see AI, especially client-side AI, as a way for Intel to make up lost ground. It will be interesting to see if the company can execute its vision.