Even the Raspberry Pi is getting in on AI

As the AI craze continues, even the microcomputer company Raspberry Pi plans to sell an AI chip. It’s integrated with Raspberry Pi’s camera software and can run AI-based applications like chatbots natively on the tiny computer. 

Raspberry Pi partnered with chipmaker Hailo for its AI Kit, which is an add-on for its Raspberry Pi 5 microcomputer that will run Hailo’s Hailo-8L M.2 accelerator. The kits will be available “soon from the worldwide network of Raspberry Pi-approved resellers” for $70.

Hailo CEO and co-founder Orr Danon tells The Verge that its accelerator’s “power consumption is below 2W and is passively cooled.” The accelerator offers 13 tera operations per second (TOPS), which is lower than chips planned for AI laptops like Intel’s 40 TOPS Lunar Lake processors.

Most AI applications run on the cloud because they often require massive amounts of energy and computing power to work. However, there has been a move to make smaller AI models and processors that require less power to bring AI to portable devices. That way, laptops and phones can run coding assistants or AI-powered photo editing applications without needing to do an API call.

AI on PCs and other portable devices is the big trend right now as many hardware makers seek to cash in on the AI demand. Microsoft revealed its laptop partners will release Copilot Plus PCs, which have built-in AI features like the controversial Recall. AMD announced new AI-branded Ryzen processors to point out that its flagship chips can now run generative AI workloads. Nvidia, which makes the much sought-after H100 GPUs that train large language models like GPT-4o, will also ship AI chips inside laptops.