When we have a chance to view it from a distance, the year 2018 may be seen as a period when innovations in a number of technological fields came together to transform not only the future of computing, but also the very structure of the Internet.
First, entrepreneurs vying to invent self-driving vehicles, virtual assistants, and intelligent industrial machines created a hunger for more powerful semiconductors that could enable scattered devices to take over sophisticated calculations powered by artificial intelligence software.
Chipmakers and software developers leapt to fill that demand, and in turn they helped spur a sea change in the Web-based storage and cloud data management industry. Companies such as AT&T experimented with “edge clouds,” or small data processing centers that could be located near A.I.-powered machines and share computational tasks with them. This could reduce the lag time in interactive virtual reality games, for example, or speed an autonomous car’s response to a traffic hazard, because data from the device would no longer have to travel so far to a central cloud data center for processing.
These new A.I. device-edge…
