The only news from the CES that might matter?

In my eyes, the only device remotely interesting presented at the latest CES Las Vegas (the Consumer Electronic Show) was NVIDIA's Project DIGITS. A $3,000 personal AI supercomputer the size of a Mac Mini that will deliver the power of large-scale AI models directly to your desk.

This is a signal.

A signal of a future where AI becomes untethered from the cloud and vast servers farms in secure locations to become embeddable and ubiquitous in everyday devices and applications. This could bring the integration of AI into various sectors, like smarter traffic control, medical imagery analysis, or supply chain optimization, without (and that's a big point) back-and-forth of any private or confidential data to a third-party AI provider. Get the box and its model, run on your data, and squeeze out the juice. Independently.

Three points come to my mind while reading about this announcement:

• NVIDIA is still the smartest player in the AI field (for now.) They run the whole gamut of solutions, from hardware to software, and are in a unique position always to shake the market a step ahead of everyone else. This is the reward you get when you control the full technology stack, and think in terms of portfolio rather than products.
• This device is a dot along the AI Moore's Law curve. As often discussed, our human brains struggle to grasp the implications of any form of exponential growth, often leading to underestimations of technological progress. Is this Mac Mini-like device really important, or is it the next jump when AI capabilities are directly embedded in cars or smart rings?
• Is this signaling a very proximal future when companies like OpenAI will be irrelevant? Without any hardware solution to offer, their investors will at least start to feel queazy. Be sure to monitor how fast OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic will try to catch up on the hardware side.