Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Why on-device is a hiring lane now For most of the past three years, "AI engineer" meant "person who calls a hosted API". That is still the bulk of the work. But a second lane has opened underneath it, and it is hiring quickly: building models that run on the device — a laptop, a phone, a vehicle head-unit, a factory gateway — with no round trip to a data centre. Three forces are pushing workloads to the edge, and none of them is a fad. First, the silicon arrived. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite ships neural processing units rated at roughly 80 TOPS on Qualcomm's own figures, enough to run a quantised small language model at conversational speed without touching the cloud. Apple, AMD and Intel are all shipping comparable NPUs. Second, the models shrank to fit. Google's Gemma 4 runs on a…
Top comments (0)