As agentic AI changes nearly every area of the enterprise, one device now evolving is the personal computer. However, AI PCs are only as good as the AI chip powering them, and AMD is aiming to stand out in the AI PC business as a top chip provider.
Over the past couple of years, the AI chipmaker has partnered with various PC makers, including Lenovo, HP, Dell and Acer. AMD has also worked to enable more developers to experiment with generative AI technology locally. For example, its Ryzen AI Halo platform, recently unveiled at CES, lets AI engineers develop, train and run large language models on their desktop rather than in the cloud.
“People actually want to take these models, do them locally, do some fine-tuning and do some experimenting with those devices locally on their desk,” said Michael Nordquist, corporate VP of Product Marketing at AMD, on the latest Targeting AI podcast episode from AI Business.
He added that while the era of AI PCs is here, many enterprises are likely to continue doing some work on personal devices.
“We believe it’s going to be a hybrid approach,” Nordquist said. “For some things, local is going to be better. For the really big models that are bleeding edge, some of the cloud models are going to be better.”
Whether enterprises take a hybrid approach or not, the sure trend is that agentic AI will become personal even within the enterprise.
“Everyone’s going to have their own personal assistant,” Nordquist said. “Now, it’s just ‘how do I do that safely?’”
“We do think that if you have that locally, you’re able to actually protect it better than having all that information across different cloud-based solutions,” he continued. “Keeping it in one spot that you have and trying to protect against that versus having all the cloud capability on a bunch of different platforms out there just increases your risk profile.”