India, July 15 -- The hardware behind the hype: On-Device vs. Cloud AI

Before making comparisons brand-to-brand, it helps to know a bit about why some AI tools are instant and private, while others are slow and data-intensive, and their answer is: It depends on where the processing is taking place. On-device AI takes place on the phone's Neural Processing Unit (NPU), so it is offline, rapid, and never passes your data to a server.

Cloud-dependent AI, by contrast, sends your request to a remote data centre for processing, which introduces network latency, depends on server queue times, and requires an active data connection to function at all.

This is precisely why Apple's Private Cloud Compute and Google's Tensor-optimised Gemini Nano ...