Yes, sorry - not remotely whimsical, just nuts-and-bolts.
Someone must already be working on this.
Machine Learning (the technology, the industry and the hype)
is
growing rapidly.
A hugely general statement, acknowledging that the term is
used very loosely as a trendy tech catchphrase.
Used
here in a totally broad and vague sense, due to a lack of
any specific knowledge on my part.
Growing in capability, size and application. Growing in
deployment, pubic awareness and marketing.
It's following the typical tech pathway from academic
research
to commercial tech lab development to geek hacklab
implementations to earliest consumer applications...
...and as it grows in usefulness (and consumer applications
begin to grow in number), the demand for ML-specific
hardware
will grow.
Google's Coral Edge TPU is now available as a consumer
product,
and certainly more will follow. But currently in a big GPU-
style
PCI card, and requires extensive technical knowledge to set
up. (edit... and in a USB stick format too)
Intel's Aspen Lake is a step towards on-chip integration of
different types of cores for different functions, but nothing
ML-
specific.
Exponential growth and spread of ML-based applications will
happen as they become more useful and useable.
So - your iPhone (a couple of generations down the line) will
need TPU(s) to do the latest cool "ML" thing quickly, and your
laptop will likewise.
And a few generations later, it will be integrated on the CPU
For those who fear AGI is just around the corner: It goes
everywhere with you, it does everything for you, and it will
know everything about you. And you will love it, because it
does
cool things. Quickly.
(post edit. so far, things like recognising people from their
voice, image etc., real-time physics modelling, object
detection/identification...)