Why Large? Tiny LMs & Agents on Edge/Robotics — Cormac Brick, Google
Tiny LLMs are essential to scale AI intelligence beyond expensive robots to mass-market devices
“If we want intelligence to get into lots and lots and lots of devices and not just really expensive robots, we are going to need tiny models.”
Google AI Edge team tech lead Cormac Brick argues that tiny language models are the critical missing piece for democratizing AI across consumer devices and affordable robotics. His team builds open-source edge deployment tooling (LiteRT, MediaPipe) and optimizes Gemma models for constrained hardware, prioritizing latency, privacy, and offline reliability. The talk frames edge AI not as a niche but as a prerequisite for AI reaching the scale of mass deployment.