Qualcomm bets big on Hybrid AI in ChatGPT era

NEW DELHI: As generative artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots like Microsoft-backed OpenAIs ChatGPT and Google Bard take the world by storm, Hybrid AI will allow generative AI developers and providers to take advantage of the compute capabilities available in edge devices to reduce costs, chip maker Qualcomm has said.

In a white paper, the company said that hybrid processing is more important than ever.

"A hybrid AI architecture distributes and coordinates AI workloads among cloud and edge devices, rather than processing in the cloud alone," said the chip maker.

The cloud and edge devices -- smartphones, cars, personal computers, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices -- work together to deliver more powerful, efficient and highly optimised AI.

"The main motivation is cost savings. For instance, generative AI-based search cost per query is estimated to increase by 10 times compared to traditional search methods -- and this is just one of many generative AI applications," Qualcomm stressed.

Hybrid AI even allows for devices and cloud to run models concurrently -- with devices running light versions of the model while the cloud processes multiple tokens of the full model in parallel and corrects the device answers if needed.

AI models with more than 1 billion parameters are already running on phones with performance and accuracy levels similar to those of the cloud, and models with 10 billion parameters or more are slated to run on devices in the near future.

"The hybrid AI approach is applicable to virtually all generative AI applications and device segments -- including phones, laptops, extended reality headsets, cars and IoT," according to Qualcomm.