personal tech
Gartner thinks we’re headed to a hybrid AI model where you offload stuff to the desktop whenever possible
Corporate PC buyers haven’t rushed to buy AI PCs but analyst firm Gartner thinks the machines can now do an important new job: Running AI workloads on the desktop to provide a hedge against tearaway token bills.The firm on Monday published a Strategic Roadmap for Agentic AI PCs in which Research Vice President Steve Kleynhans argues that enterprise AI tools that run on the desktop “have been slow to materialize.”“On -device AI has yet to achieve mainstream adoption and remains largely confined to developer and enthusiast use cases,” he added.
He thinks that’s about to change as businesses are paying more attention to the cost of cloud-based AI, and especially “Tokenomics,” the frustratingly imprecise science of trying to figure out how each AI service provider defines a “token” and charges for them at different times.
“As enterprises gain a better understanding of AI cloud cost dynamics, many are looking to AI PCs as a potential offset,” Kleynhans wrote. “Enterprises are becoming increasingly concerned about the economic sustainability of cloud-centric AI strategies as token consumption and associated usage costs continue to rise, driving greater interest in a hybrid strategy, by identifying workloads that can be processed more efficiently at the edge or on the device itself.”The analyst admits “there is no consensus yet on the level of cost benefit” but feels the potential for savings is “clear.”The main reason for his optimism is advances in development of small language models (SLMs), small reasoning models (SRMs), and targeted domain-specific language models. He’s not alone in that opinion: The Register recently covered the likes of Microsoft and Google using smaller models for some tasks.
