If I look at how the AI industry has evolved over the last few years, I see three broad waves.

The first wave was about building the intelligence. GPUs provided the compute needed to train increasingly large models, while frontier AI companies turned that compute into increasingly capable foundation models. Without the massive increase in GPU compute, the progress we have seen in AI would simply not have been possible.

The second wave was about scaling that intelligence. Cloud platforms, networking, data centers, power and the broader infrastructure ecosystem became critical to training and running these models at scale.

I think we are now entering the third wave. Bringing that intelligence much closer to the end user.

I have been saying for some time that I don’t think we will always send every AI request to a large model sitting in the cloud. As models become smaller and more capable, we will see more specialized models running directly on laptops, phones and other devices. We are already seeing the early signs with AI PCs, dedicated NPUs and local models. The device is increasingly becoming capable of doing meaningful AI processing without sending everything back to the cloud.

But I think the bigger change may not just be about making the laptop or phone more powerful. It could change the way we interact with computers altogether.

Today, we still largely use a keyboard, mouse and screen. We type something, click something and get a response. What happens when the computer can understand our voice, what is on the screen, what we are looking at and the context around what we are working on? We are already seeing experiments with glasses, voice, cameras and gesture-based interfaces. As AI becomes more capable, the keyboard and mouse may still exist, but they may no longer be the primary way we interact with computing.

Imagine working on an idea and simply telling your computer what you are trying to achieve. It understands the context, works through the problem with you, brings together the information you need, creates something and comes back to you for the decisions that need your attention. That is a very different computing experience. And this is why I think the next big value creation in AI may not come only from the next frontier model or the next data center.

It could come from reimagining the end-user computing experience around AI.
The model may be the brain. The device could become the way we experience and work with that intelligence. I think this could be the next big wave of AI innovation.

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PS: All views are personal