On the other hand, Movidius’s new chips do not need a lot of power to run. Without help from servers, they can do complex computations right on the device they are in, which may be able to bring AI to smartphones and tablets, and even robots and drones one day. In a video released by the two companies, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Google’s machine intelligence research head, said “Instead of us adapting to computers and having to learn their language, computers are becoming more and more intelligent in the sense that they adapt to us.” As part of the new partnership, Google will license Movidius’ chips, and aid the company with its technology. Google wasn’t available immediately to provide information on how it hopes to use Movidius’s chips. However, there could soon be a Movidius-powered Android device that uses its camera not only to see and record, but to make sense of the world, just like humans do, considering smartphones are one of its few consumer products.
The first smartphone that could see the world was introduced by Lenovo at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show, which is the product of a partnership with Google’s larger computer vision commercialization project, called Project Tango. This phone would be able measure exactly how big an object is by eyeballing it, or tell you exactly where something is in a supermarket by connecting to the supermarket’s database. Still others are looking for ways to include this low-power computer vision tech into robots. We have hope that Google and Movidius’s association very soon make robots that can do much more than rolling into walls or vacuum the floor.