How to Build AI at the Edge of the Device — Ori Katz, Hailo

Description

Ori Katz, who leads the AI SoC domain at Hailo, tells the story of how an Israeli chip company became a serious player in AI at the edge — smart cameras, surveillance, industrial, automotive and robotics. The conversation (hosted by Yael) dives into the era's biggest challenges: how to compress large models onto edge devices, how to deal with price, memory and power, and why hardware demands far deeper product management than people assume — fewer flashy features, more hard decisions about cost, supply chain, quality and time to production. Along the way: the Raspberry Pi partnership as both a distribution engine and a quality stamp, the memory crisis, the gap between China and the West, and why physical AI and robotics are the strategic bet for the next 3-4 years.

Key moments

1. 0:20 · Intro: between flights to Taiwan and Korea
2. 0:52 · What Hailo does: accelerating AI at the edge
3. 1:40 · Raspberry Pi and the AI HAT: the community link
4. 2:38 · Ori's path: from R&D to product
5. 3:36 · From 15 to ~280 people: how a hardware company looks
6. 4:38 · Why they chose an accelerator over the cloud
7. 5:24 · The value of the Raspberry Pi partnership
8. 6:03 · Moving to dedicated chips for smart cameras
9. 7:18 · Seeing in the dark: AI for denoising
10. 8:20 · Building the SoC unit
11. 9:32 · The unsexy side of hardware: price and supply chain
12. 10:21 · An industrial example: the German brewery
13. 11:57 · Where Hailo operates today
14. 12:28 · Gen AI at the edge: cameras you can talk to
15. 13:42 · The technical challenge: compressing smaller models
16. 14:19 · The memory and cost crisis (DRAM/HBM)
17. 15:39 · Why not run everything in the cloud
18. 17:03 · Physical AI and robotics: the next bet
19. 18:30 · Surveillance as an exploding field
20. 20:33 · Community and distribution as an adoption engine
21. 21:12 · China vs. the West in surveillance
22. 24:47 · AI in hardware development: Cadence, Synopsys and debug
23. 28:42 · Automotive and generative AI: talking to the car
24. 32:09 · Competitors: Axelera, DEEPX, Ambarella, Qualcomm
25. 33:37 · The camera market, production and cost reduction
26. 36:47 · What really matters in hardware product management
27. 39:52 · Wrap-up