Introduction
Welcome back to Laboratory, our deep-dive series charting the forces that will shape the next chapter of AI. Today we bring to your attention the The Future of AI Processing, an MIT Technology Review Insights report that shows how intelligence is escaping the cloud and taking root in the silicon all around us. Think phones that reason, glasses that translate, tractors that navigate, and robots that scout Martian caves—all made possible by a new doctrine: heterogeneous compute.
Here’s what we’ll be unpacking:
Silicon Spreads Out – why the centre of gravity is sliding from rack-mounted GPUs to edge devices, and what that means for latency, privacy, and cost.
Heterogeneous by Design – how CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and bespoke accelerators now collaborate inside a single product, and the developer tooling race this triggers.
Ambient Intelligence at Home – from smart baby monitors to Ray-Ban Meta glasses, proof that on-device inference is already woven into everyday life.
Agentic Workflows at Work – Llama-powered copilots, factory-floor vision systems, and NASA’s cave-walking robots reveal how mixed compute unlocks autonomy.
The Creative Edge – generative guitars, living data sculptures, and console-native NPCs hint at an entertainment revolution that plays out millimetres from the player.
The Complexity Tax – tool-chain sprawl, security surface expansion, and silicon obsolescence: the hidden costs of distributing intelligence.
Roadmap to 2030 – forecasting where the mesh of sensors, chips, and clouds is heading, and why energy budgets may become the new bottleneck.
Strap in as we follow the electrons—from edge to cloud and back again—to see how mastering heterogeneous compute will separate tomorrow’s AI leaders from the laggards.
