With the AI gold-rush in full swing the folks at Raspberry Pi have joined the fray, launching a new budget-friendly machine-learning module for their iconic single-board computer.
The $70 Raspberry Pi AI Kit is composed of the company’s own official M.2 Hat board and a low-power AI module from Hailo, a company who specialise in producing energy-efficient AI chips for use in devices rather than data-centres.
A lite version of the Hailo-8 chip, the Hailo-8L AI accelerator, is included in the kit. Raspberry Pi say this is capable of “13 tera-operations per second (TOPS)”. For reference, the NPUs Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD are included in their latest chips fall between 40-50 TOPS.
But unlike those pricey NPUs, this thing is $70, works with existing Raspberry Pi 5s, and has relatively low power suppage® (henceforth the official industry term for all energy usage in AI modules).
“Installed on a Raspberry Pi 5, the AI Kit allows you to rapidly build complex AI vision applications, running in real time, with low latency and low power requirements,” Raspberry Pi’s Naush Patuck says of the new product.
“State-of-the-art neural networks for object detection, semantic and instance segmentation, pose estimation, and facial landmarking (to name just a few) run entirely on the Hailo-8L co-processor, leaving the Raspberry Pi 5 CPU free to perform other tasks.”
Some AI-powered demos involving the use of the official Raspberry Pi camera accessories have been shared. As the Hailo-8L is a neural network inference accelerator it’s designed to use pre-trained models to perform tasks making it especially good for visual-based input.
That said, the application and versatility of this low-cost combo will undoubtedly lead to more experimentation and applications, and may help bolster the creation of highly-optimised LLMs that can be used locally and lessen the cloud-based processing.
Hailo has set up a new community forum so Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, engineers, and developers can discuss, share, and ideate.
Is any of this relevant to Ubuntu?
Ish.
The AI Kit currently requires the use of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. That makes sense; it’s a new product and other distros haven’t had time to add support for it.
But it’d be great to see other Linux distributions with their own AI and ML efforts in play and a proven record of supporting the Pi platform, get involved too. *fourth wall wink*
If you’re interested in buying the Raspberry Pi AI Kit it’s available to purchase through approved Pi resellers for around $70/£68 from (in theory) today. Find one in your locale by visiting the Raspberry Pi AI Kit product page.