Raspberry Pi and Sony announce collaboration to bring AI to Raspberry Pi
This is potentially a massive announcement. Sony, the company that already manufactures the Raspberry Pi has announced that they have made a “strategic” investment in Raspberry Pi Ltd to bring edge AI to the Raspberry Pi!
“Our goal is to provide new value to a variety of industries and support them in solving issues using our innovative edge AI sensing technology built around image sensors,” said Terushi Shimizu, President and CEO of Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation. “We are very pleased to be partnering with Raspberry Pi Ltd. to bring our AITRIOS™ platform — which supports the development of unique and diverse solutions utilising our edge AI devices — to the Raspberry Pi user and developer community and provide a unique development experience.”
So AITRIOS is Sony’s platform for developing Edge AI systems rather than a chip or family of chips. Will this be a native software capability integrated into Raspberry Pi OS or some hardware added to a new Raspberry Pi device (Raspberry PI 5?). It’s unclear, and Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi says:
“This collaboration further expands our relationship and introduces products using Sony Semiconductor Solutions’ AI technology into the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. This will allow users to use machine learning at the edge to create new attractions. We will help you to build a realistic application.”
Eben Upton, CEO Raspberry Pi
But nonetheless, it shows both companies’ direction in easier and more powerful focus and support for AI. How exciting is that?
Hardware
OpenMV, which makes camera/processor modules announced a new upgraded camera in the Open MV Cam RT. This is an upgrade to their Cam H7 Plus, which they’ve struggled to manufacture due to the ongoing chip shortages. So instead, they decided to design a better camera designed around parts they could get hold of. The Cam RT is based around a Cortex-M7 @ 600 MHz w/ Double Precision FPU, is around 1.25 faster than the H7, and has 4x the program space, High-speed USB, 10/100 Ethernet, Wifi and BLE onboard. They’re slating a 2k production run in June.
ArduCam is saying that their Arducam Mega – SPI Camera will start shipping out in the next few weeks. This is an autofocus camera that uses SPI to link to any microcontroller. What is unique is that both commands AND image data are sent across a ubiquitous SPI bus. I was sceptical that you could get sufficient bandwidth to do this, but the demos seem to suggest a decent throughput can be obtained. I’m a backer, so I will be excited to try this new camera out.
Whilst on the subject of Arducam, their Pico4ML-Pro TinyML Dev Kit is on presale for shipment in April and they’ve just announced that you’ll also get an enclosure for this bad boy. This is a Raspberry Pi 2040-based TinyML development kit no onboard camera) that can do Person detection, Wake Word detection and Magic Wand. It comes with a 2.4’ LCD Display and can connect to 4 Arducam Mega Cameras, all for the very respectable $59.99.
Crowdfunding Now
Duovox Ultra: Military-Grade Night Vision Monocular is a “Full colour at low light & 7-level IR illuminator at pitch darkness,1080FHD, up to 500m range, up to 10 hrs battery”. Pretty neat, with pledge levels starting at $129 and 22 days to go.
This Week in AI
Chinese technology company Alibaba announced plans to roll out it’s ChatGPT rival called Tongyi Qianwen. Tongyi Qianwen roughly translates as “seeking an answer by asking a thousand questions.”
Some slightly older ChatGPT news: ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns. They said there was no legal basis to justify “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of ‘training’ the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform”. They are going to try and get OpenAI under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations. OpenAI has “20 days to say how it would address the watchdog’s concerns, under penalty of a fine of €20 million ($21.7m) or up to 4% of annual revenues.”
And who can ignore the worry that AI is going to end the World as leading figures call for a suspension of AI Training. They want “training of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months.” Leading luminaries, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, have all signed an open letter calling for the halt. You could argue that a lot of those asking for the halt are all engaged in their own AI tools and feel that they need to catch up. In fact, what a surprise, Elon now announces his own rival AI company. Funny that.
The sad reality, I feel, is that whatever the perceived dangers of AI represent, the genie is already out of the bottle. You can’t stop everyone now advancing it, and particularly you can’t sit idly by whilst certain not-so-democratic regimes steal a march on the rest of the World. The AI arms race has already begun, and I don’t think we can stop it.
“AI humans plot and gossip like us”. AI researchers at Stanford created human-like entities with ChatGPT to “create 25 characters who “live” in a fictional world called Smallville” (where’s Superman???). “They slept, cooked meals and went to work. They formed opinions, made new friendships, nurtured grudges and gossiped”. !!